#animal

Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy. As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants. ↗

— Thomas French

#elephants #stealth #life

Sometimes you want to stay with someone, not only because it's magic and it's promising and it feels like home; but sometimes you find someone and you want to stay with him (or her)—because you're the same kind of animal. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#attraction #desire #love #man-and-woman #rawness

Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishing the path of enamoration from the Road to Damascus; subsequently ensnared, held fast, immobilised, nose stuck to the image (the mirror). In that moment when the other's image comes to ravish me for the first time, I am nothing more than the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner's wonderful Hen: feet tied, the hen went to sleep with her eyes fixed on the chalk line, which was traced not far from her beak; when she was untied, she remained motionless, fascinated, "submitting to her vanquisher," as the Jesuit says (1646); yet, to waken her from her enchantment, to break off the violence of her Image-repertoire (vehemens animalis imaginatio), it was enough to tap her on the wing; she shook herself and began pecking in the dust again. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#love-at-first-sight #road-to-damascus #vehemens-animalis-imaginato #love

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#holocaust #veganism #holocaust

I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food system have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord. ↗

— Brian Awehali

#cruelty #ethics #food #plant-intelligence #veganism

Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity. ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#animal #animals #cruelties #cruelty #fashion

Animals, like us, are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neither are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being. ↗

— Gary Kowalski

#being #souls #love

Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?' No,' I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it's not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle. ↗

— Jerry Spinelli

#pets #love

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#humor #terror #humor

More often than not, what animals require our protection from is not hurricanes or fires, but abuse at the hands of other people". ↗

— Julie Klam

#animals #dog #protection #love