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.
To sit idly, not doing, merely experiencing, comes hard to a primate.
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.
In my cosmology, indigenous wild deer are more important than exotic ornamental shrubs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The story of cats is a story of meat.
You can look at your dog and see that it's thinking and has strong feelings. And if it does, so do wolves. And if wolves do, so do elephants. People aren't the only beings that think and feel.
Dogs are a window on the natural world.
I would like to visit a dog's mind to know what he's thinking and feeling.
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.
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.
No other creatures of the savannah sleep as deeply or as soundly as lions, but after all, lions are the main reason for not sleeping soundly.
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.
With all due respect to the nation's fish and game departments, more deer die because people hunt them than because people feed them.
Many expressions of a cat's feelings seem deeply related to the capture of live prey.
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.
People are perfectly glad to accept the idea that dogs love us, so they must be able to love each other.
