#animals

Wer kann es sagen, wer nur ahnen, wie weit das Geistesvermögen der Tiere geht! ↗

— Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann

#intelligence #intelligence

My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us. The glass says you are this and we are that and that is how it will always be. ↗

— Katherine Applegate

#humanity #life

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. ↗

— Anatole France

#love #pets #love

The path of the norm is the path of least resistance; it is the route we take when we're on auto-pilot and don't even realize we're following a course of action that we haven't consciously chosen. Most people who eat meat have no idea that they're behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call 'free choice' is, in fact, the result of a narrowly obstructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don't realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species' preference for survival. ↗

— Melanie Joy

#carnism #meat #norms #veganism #life

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#men

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them. ↗

— Lloyd Alexander

#men

Animals shouldn’t be hunted and nature shouldn’t be disturbed, even destroyed, to benefit the whims of mankind ↗

— Charles Manson

#benefit #charles-manson #destroyed #humans #hunted

A few alligators are naturally of the vicious type and inclined to resent it when you prod them with a stick. You can find out which ones these are by prodding them. ↗

— Will Cuppy

#humor #reptiles #nature

The animal should not be measured by man. In a world older than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. ↗

— Henry Beston

#nature #nature

Spiders don't chew. They send a special liquid into their prey. The prey's insides turn to mush. Then the spider sucks up its tasty lunch! ↗

— Julie Murphy

#arachnids #children-s-books #nature #spider #nature