Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Quotes
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I always thought of deer as solitary animals that weren't very interesting. But my goodness, that was very wrong. The big eye-opener for me was that they're social. They have family groups.
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The relationships we have with dogs seem simple enough and often are taken for granted. But these relationships can be deep and mysterious, and not at all simple.
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People acquire a dog, don't understand it, can't train it, get fed up, and... offer it for adoption, hoping to pass on the problem to somebody else. But nobody wants a problem dog.
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Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.
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All the members of the dog family - domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, dingoes - are very aware of territory. A group must control its own territory - you can't have others taking it from you, because then you won't have enough food.
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As far as I'm concerned, I own my dogs as I own my body. My legs are with me when I take a shower, and I feel no shame. If I were to lose one, I'd grieve, and people would send sympathy cards, but it would be my condition that evoked the sympathy, not the fate of the leg. That's like losing a dog.
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When we became sedentary, lived indoors, and started to raise livestock, we began to see wolves not as occasional fur-bearers or fellow hunters but as robbers.
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To sit idly, not doing, merely experiencing, comes hard to a primate.
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This was what you did in the '50s: You get married, get a job, put your husband through graduate school, and have two kids - a girl and a boy.
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Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom. But dogs feel it as peace.
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We may never find a way to live in suburbia with deer as we do with raccoons, say, or squirrels. So for this reason, it's very important that we make sure always to save enough wild or open land so that they can live in their normal manner.
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From the very dawn of time until now and well into the future... human-animal companionship is at the very core of our instincts not only for mutual survival, but mutually rewarding relationships.
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We fill the woods with invasive primates camouflaged to look like piles of leaves who sneak around, sprinkling estrus doe urine and manipulating gadgets that sound like antlers clashing.
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We used to go in the woods by ourselves, and you can't help noticing the world then, especially animals. People used to know a lot about the natural world, especially in the country.
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People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.
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Many expressions of a cat's feelings seem deeply related to the capture of live prey.
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People are perfectly glad to accept the idea that dogs love us, so they must be able to love each other.
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Barring some competition from whales, wolves are probably America's most popular wild animal. Wolves are also contenders for America's most unpopular wild animal, with perhaps some competition from coyotes.
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We are surely the primary agent of death for all members of the cat tribe. For many if not most cat species, our depredations must surpass accidents, disease, and even starvation by a considerable margin.
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Besides individual things like thunder and gunshots, what dogs fear most is not belonging, being alone.
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Every dog might wish to be Dog One, but like us, most dogs want membership in the group even more than they want supremacy over others.
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Once you're known to be an alcoholic, that's how many people identify you, which could be a reason not to talk about it.
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Dogs like to learn stuff, if not from another dog, then people are OK... They love activity, playing, interesting walks, and just belonging, being together.
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If you don't have manufactured items or anything we think of as 'civilization,' then you're living according to your species.