#animals

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

I’ll never go hungry, because I’m a pet owner and a meat eater. I used to own broccoli, but taking it for a walk in the park didn’t work out so well. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#broccoli #hunger #hungry #meat #park

Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge. ↗

— Tom Regan

#humans #self-knowledge

When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout. Animals' emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow. ↗

— Marc Bekoff

#emotion #empathy

I can't abide people who go soft over animals and then cheat every human they come across! ↗

— Diana Wynne Jones

#cheat #humor #people #humor

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

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God." Aristotle ↗

— Bruce Wayne Sullivan

#animals #childhood-memories #dogs #good-book #life-struggles

Wild creatures' eyes, the colonel said, Are innocent and fathomless And when I look at them I see That they are not aware of me And oh I find and oh I bless A comfort in this emptiness They only see me when they want To pounce upon me at the hunt; But in the tame variety There couches an anxiety As if they yearned, yet knew not what They yearned for, nor they yearned for not. And so my dog would look at me And it was pitiful to see Such love and such dependency. The human heart is not at ease With animals that look like these. ↗

— Stevie Smith

#poetry #love

Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we're alienated from the rich, diverse, and magnificent world in which we live. ↗

— Marc Bekoff

#inspirational #inspirational