Thomas French Quotes & Sayings

Mkhaya's herd is a good-sized group - sixteen in all, counting the calves - and even though they are the largest land mammals on earth, they are not always easy to find. Elephants, it runs out, are surprisingly stealthy. — Thomas French

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

What's the reality of being inside a zoo, for the animals and for the people who love and care for those animals? There's a lot of joy, and there's a lot of loss. — Thomas French

New life insists. It does not debate. It simply appears, trembling and hungry, and will not be denied. — Thomas French

Freedom is a human concept. We have these very romanticized, sentimentalized notions of freedom. And for species - monkeys and other creatures - freedom is a pretty risky, complex proposition that's not always for their benefit. — Thomas French

On an overcrowded planet where more species slip toward extinction every day, should one species have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others to oblivion? — Thomas French

All zoos, even the most enlightened, are built upon the idea both beguiling and repellent - the notion that we can seek out the wildness of the world and behold its beauty, but that we must first contain that wildness. Zoos argue that they are fighting for the conservation of the Earth, that they educate the public and provide refuge and support for vanishing species. And they are right. Animal-rights groups argue that zoos traffic in living creatures, exploiting them for financial gain and amusement. And they are right. Caught inside this contradiction are the animals themselves, and the humans charged with their well-being. — Thomas French

All zoos are both beguiling and repellent. — Thomas French

Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature's impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it's like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans of fly above its forests - even though most animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild. — Thomas French