#animals

Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them... they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight. ↗

— Orison Swett Marden

#bluff #cowards #eye #liable #like

Every animal is a tradition, and together they are a vast part of our heritage as human beings. No animal completely lacks humanity, yet no person is ever completely human. By ourselves, we people are simply balls of protoplasm. We merge with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers. Then we become funny or tragic; we can be loved, hated, pitied, and admired. For us, animals are all the strange, beautiful, pitiable, and frightening things that they have ever been: gods, slaves, totems, sages, tricksters, devils, clowns, companions, lovers, and far more. ↗

— Boria Sax

#traditions #beauty

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. ↗

— Albert Schweitzer

#ethical #fellow #fellow men #help #him

Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon as I matured back into his son, I came to appreciate what he was saying -- an endearing and magnanimous reminder of how family will always be the sum of its individual members, be they human or animal. ↗

— Nick Trout

#family #pets #family

People's hearts are like wild animals. They attach their selves to those that love and train them. ↗

— Ali ibn Abi Talib

#hearts #like #love #people #selves

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

Once bitten twice shy? Sure, but... why not get a bigger dog and bite them back? ↗

— A.A. Bell

#bell #bit #comedy #crime #dogs

Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. ↗

— César Chávez

#animal-rights #kindness-to-animals #vegan #civilization

We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different--cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness--but because our perception of them is different. ↗

— Melanie Joy

#carnism #cows #dogs #ethics #meat

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#animals #slaughter #veganism #vegetarian #stress