Animals That Have Died Quotes & Sayings

Killing was a relatively simple matter--a blow to the head, a knife to the throat--complicated only by how much one cared about the pain or terrors animals felt in dying.... The animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that had killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures. — William Cronon

The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens' arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion). — Yuval Noah Harari

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. ( ... ) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice. — Leslie Marmon Silko

I have been a vegetarian for about 10 years. And it really was due to the reading that I did. And they explain so that you understand why it's important for the planet's survival along with compassion for animals. It certainly made it much easier for me. I lost weight really fast. My mother died from cancer so this is all very personal to me. And I just would like the planet to be a better place. And I think you'll find a vegetarian diet to be really incredible these days — Linda Blair

He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl's tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being's wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die
(any time!)
and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child's hands could feel. — Stephen King

Animals aren't any better equipped to survive an emergency than humans are. Few people missed the fact that after Hurricane Katrina, people died because buses and emergency shelters wouldn't allow their animals. — Ingrid Newkirk

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise. — Raoul Vaneigem

People may hope that the meat they buy came from an animal who died without pain, but they do not really want to know about it. Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed do not deserve to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy. — Peter Singer

Drugs, sex, Satan, and power, Eve mused. A religious war? Hadn't humans fought and died for beliefs since the dawn of time? Animals fought for territory; people fought for territory as well. And for gain, for passion, for beliefs. For the hell of it. — J.D. Robb

Elayne could not help herself. Nynaeve wielding her tongue like a needle, Cerandin stubborn as two mules, and now this. She threw back her head and screamed with frustration.
When the sound died, it seemed as if the animals had quieted. Horse handlers stood about, staring at her. Coolly, she ignored them. Nothing could worm its way under her skin now. She was as calm as ice, perfectly in control of herself.
"Was that a cry for help," Birgitte said, tilting her head, "or are you hungry? I suppose I could find a wet nurse in - "
Elayne strode away with a snarl that would have done any of the leopards proud. — Robert Jordan

I have always felt like a pawn ... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that. — Gregory Maguire

How often the priest had heard the same confession
Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization
it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt. — Graham Greene

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Animals died when their time came, and meanwhile they didn't bother with clothes, or go to war, or get drunk, or judge other animals by there look. They didn't get afraid unless there was something to be afraid of. She herself came apart with terror over something she couldn't define or understand. She didn't get afraid of something. She just got terrified Filled with anxiety. For no reason. For no reason she could name. Would name.
Animals didn't look back with shivering shame at things in their past. They didn't quake at the thought of what lay ahead. They didn't try to make it into clique and feel sick with humiliation because they couldn't make it. — Mary Stolz

It was fun for me also to point out that this brand of young-Earth creationism claims that kangaroos came from a huge ship, the ark, which is supposed to have safely run aground on Mount Ararat in modern-day Turkey. It's a respectable peak - 5,165 meters (almost 17,000 feet) - and it's snowcapped. It's not clear to me how all the animals and humans made the arduous descent. The kangaroos, both of them, are supposed to have made it down the mountain, ran or hopped from there to Australia - and no one saw them. Furthermore, if they took a reasonable amount of time to make the trip, you'd expect some kangaroo pups or joeys to have been born and some adults to have died along the way. You'd expect some kangaroo fossils out there somewhere in what is now Laos or Tibet. Also, they are supposed to have run across a land bridge from Eurasia to Australia. But there's no evidence of such a bridge or any kangaroo fossils in that area, not any. — Bill Nye

THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME

"That day, the saucer day the zombie day

The Ragnarok and fairies day, the

day the great winds came

And snows, and the cities turned

to crystal, the day

All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the

Computers turned, the screens telling

us we would obey, the day

Angels, drunk and muddled,

stumbled from the bars,

And all the bells of London

were sounded, the day

Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,

The fluttering capes and arrival of

the Time Machine day,

You didn't notice any of this because

you were sitting in your room,

not doing anything

not even reading, not really, just

looking at your telephone,

wondering if I was going to call. — Neil Gaiman

Landing on his feet was nothing new to Caleb. He did not believe in luck, he believed in the law of nature. Animals did not rely on luck. They lived and died by their instincts. — Arlene Hunt

They all went to Bobbi and tried to reason
They told him because of the cold winter,
it was a bad season
They pleaded with Bobbi and asked if he could share
as they wouldn't survive if he didn't care

Bobbi laughed at them and zoomed even louder
'What a bunch of losers', he thought even prouder

Some bees died and the rest flew away
To another field far, far away — Elise Icten

Medicine in 1979, he declared: Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I mourned especially when the last beaver died. — Kurt Vonnegut

The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you've already reproduced. — Neal Barnard

[...] it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more. — Douglas Coupland

I think it's cool to wear roadkill. If I died and somebody wanted to wear my teeth around their neck to VMAs, I'd feel honored. — Ke$ha

The pigs had an even harder struggle to counteract the lies put about by Moses, the tame raven. Moses, who was Mr. Jones's especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but he was also a clever talker. He claimed to know of the existence of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. It was situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, Moses said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges. The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade them that there was no such place. — George Orwell

I am not a complete vegetarian. I eat only animals that have died in their sleep. — George Carlin

As night fell, the prehistoric landscape came alive with sound: howling and shrieking, screaming, calling and barking. "I've suddenly realized why all of these animals died out," Scathach — Michael Scott

All of us in society are supposed to believe that cruelty to animals is wrong and that it is a good thing to prevent needless suffering. So if that is true, how can meat be acceptable under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, such as perhaps roasting the bird who died flying into a window? — Ingrid Newkirk

Prying out a stump reminded him of how deeply a tree clung to the ground, how tenacious a hold it had on a place. Though he was not a sentimental man - he did not cry when his children died, he simply dug the graves and buried them - James was silent each time he killed a tree, thinking of its time spent in that spot. He never did this with the animals he hunted - they were food, and transient, passing through this world and out again, as people did. But trees felt permanent - until you had to cut them down. — Tracy Chevalier

Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone 24 hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and sylviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies in their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, these days, then he's likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its oohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care. — Martin Amis

THEIR BELIEF. IT is a strange revelation to find that the natives believe in a common Creator, and that their race sprang from one man and woman. There is no mistake that this it; their belief. Their Creator's name is GNURKER. They allow that he has a wife, who gave birth to the first couple sent to populate the earth. When their God saw that this earth was fit for man, and that all animal life and fishes were plentiful, He caused an immense whirlwind, which reached from Heaven to earth, and sent down him son and daughter with full instructions in all manner of ceremonies. They were to name their children by four tribal names--Banaka, Boorung, Paljarri, Kymera--and thus observe the marriage laws. They were to strictly follow out His commands, and when they died, their and their children's spirits would be received into heaven. They were given control over the fishes of the waters, the birds of the air, all animals, insects, and every living thing--that — John G. Withnell

It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life? — Frans De Waal

That the sun still rose the next morning was incredibly unjust. Someone good had died. People still woke up, had breakfast, went to work, and it was wrong. Flower petals still opened in the sun's early light, and animals still grazed the day away, their minds untroubled. Someone good had died and the world had the audacity to move on. — Jay Bell

During the ice age, many animals died of cold, so the porcupines decided to band together to provide one another with warmth and protection. But their spines or quills kept sticking into their surrounding companions, precisely those who provided most warmth. And so they drifted apart again. And again many of them died of cold. They had to make a choice: either risk extinction or accept their fellow porcupines' spines. Very wisely, they decided to huddle together again. They learned to live with the minor wounds inflicted by their relatives, because the key to their survival was that shared warmth. — Paulo Coelho

Typhus appeared in the winter of 1846. The Irish called it the black fever because it made victims' faces swollen and dark. It was incredibly contagious, spread by lice, which were everywhere. Many people lived in one-room cottages, humans and animals all huddled together, and there was no way to avoid lice jumping from person to person. The typhus bacteria also traveled in louse feces, which formed an invisible dust in the air. Anyone who touched an infected person, or even an infected person's clothes, could become the disease's next victim. Typhus was the supreme killer of the famine; in the winter of 1847, thousands of people died of it every week. Another — Ryan Hackney