Quotes & Sayings About Relationships With Animals

I spent the day running through the woods like a wild animal. Being chased by you is the only thing that would have made it more romantic. — Amanda Mosher

In 2013, science writer Natalie Angier gave the centrality of female friendship a zoological boost, pointing out that, In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turns out to be the basic unit of social life. — Rebecca Traister

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

What makes me feel alive is community, connectedness. Certainly family, parenting, relationships, friendship. All the way into colleague relationships and relationship with spirit, relationship with one's own self and inner child, and animals, earth, planet. Fostering and nurturing and really focusing on connection - connection in relationship with other and my own self and God. When I don't feel connected in all those three areas, life is not very good. — Alanis Morissette

People are a lot like animals. Most of them are kind, but some are cruel. And the cruel ones are cruel because they were never trained properly. -- Six — J.S. Veter

Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature - from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms - plants, animals, and fungi - to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance. — Michael Pollan

As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basis human for anatomy, as long as even a few students feel a strong curiosity to learn about the course of evolution and relationships of animals, the old problems of taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution will gradually reassert themselves even in competition with brilliant and highly fruitful laboratory studies in cytology, genetics and physiological chemistry. — William King Gregory

The only difference between kids and jungle animals is pants. Kids wear them. Jungle animals don't. — Denis Leary

Family is the nucleus unit of any society. Although modern science allows us to create life in a petri dish, I believe God designed humans - like all other animals - to be born of a male and a female union in the context of family according to His divine plan for our spiritual development. Family grounds us and grows us. We first learn how to relate to others through our family relationships. We learn to change and adapt according to the needs of our family. For instance, a mother will notice the subtle moves and shiftings of her baby in her womb. As the baby squirms and moves about, the mother will adjust her body to make the baby more comfortable. Sometimes I think back to the days when I carried my own babies. Tending to their tiniest needs, I began to understand that God tends to our smallest needs just as well. — Taffi Dollar

We poetically construct our identity as human beings, together with our values, largely through reciprocal relationships with animals. They provide us with essential points of reference, as well as illustrations of the qualities that we may choose to emulate or avoid in ourselves. Any major change in our relationships with animals, individual or collective, reverberates profoundly in our character as human beings, in ways that go far beyond immediately pragmatic concerns. When a species becomes extinct, something perishes in the human soul as well. — Boria Sax

Non-violence is more powerful than violence. Nature eliminates violent animals bit by bit. — Amit Ray

Wolves and Doves mate for life. I hope in the next life I am one of the two. — Amanda Mosher

I felt like an animal, and animals don't know sin, do they? — Jess C. Scott

Animals are precious gifts offering unconditional love. — Kat Kaelin

Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals. — Richard Dawkins

Human beings are social animals and nearly all of us are driven by the need to be loved and the desire to successfully sustain meaningful romantic relationships for life. — Matthew Hussey

Animals are divine messengers of miracles that go far beyond emotional comfort and practical assistance. Talk to those who have been transported to a heavenly place by the gentle purring of a kitten or whose broken hearts, burdened by worry and pain, have been mended by a dog licking their hand. They will tell you that animals connect them with the River of Life in ways poets imagine and mystics contemplate. They will tell you that their deepest and most sincere relationships with animals are spiritual partnerships. — Allen Anderson

The only consistency in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency. — Hal Herzog

It took me a lifetime of glimpses, but now I see you completely - did I tell you you're beautiful? so kind to animals, children and me ... — John Geddes

Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it. — Gavin Maxwell

Forgiveness is the only way to break the cycle of blame-and pain-in a relationship ... It does not settle all questions of blame and justice and fairness ... But it does allow relationships to start over. In that way, said Solzhenitsyn, we differ from all animals. It is not our capacity to think that makes us different, but our capacity to repent, and to forgive. — Philip Yancey

My own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love. — Barbara Kingsolver

Small animals are a great problem. I wish God had never created small animals, or else that He had made them so they could talk, or else that He'd given them better faces. Space. Take moths. They fly at the lamp and burn themsleves, and then they fly right back again. It can't be instinct, because it isn't the way it works. They just don't understand, so they go right on doing it. Then they lie on their backs and all their legs quiver, and then they're dead. Did you get all that? Does it sound good?"
"Very good," Grandmother said.
Sophia stood up and shouted, "Say this: say I hate everything that dies slow! Say I hate everything that won't let you help! Did you write that? — Tove Jansson

How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of those shard human (and indeed also most divine) attributes that are supposed to distinguish us absolutely from animals but, more significant, the imbrications of our various pasts and presents, the ineluctable relationships of shred and contested meanings, values, and material resources? It is necessary to assert our dense particularities, our lived and imagined differences; but can we afford to leave untheorized the question of how our differences are intertwined and, indeed, hierarchically organized? Could we, in other words, afford to have entirely different histories, to see ourselves living - and having lived - in entirely heterogenous and discrete spaces? — Satya P. Mohanty

Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you - seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call! — Bryant McGill

Hunting in my experience - and by hunting I simply mean being out on the land - is a state of mind. All of one's faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it, one so absorbing that you cease to talk with your human companions. It means to release yourself from rational images of what something "means" and to be concerned only that it "is." And then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships - fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven's distant voice - become patterns. The patterns are always in motion. — Barry Lopez

It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak. — Helen Macdonald

The world doesn't owe you anything because you're in it, but you owe yourself the world because it is in you. — Kat Kaelin

A glad welcome to this affirmation by a group of psychologists that the self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Pa never told stories like Grandpa. Or treated the barn like family. Eli knew how Grandpa's own pa had built the barn by hand, hauling bluestone for the foundation behind a stubborn ox with horns as wide as a tractor. How the smell of the plank walls was like family and how you never washed your chore coat so the animals would smell that you were family, too. — Sandra Neil Wallace

Human relationships with predators have always been thorny. Predators are the first creatures our kind purposely eradicates. Too often, people feel humans are and should be in control; we are enraged to discover this is not true. And when other creatures share our appetites and kill our livestock (often animals we were raising to kill, ourselves), we call them vandals and murderers ... Predators are the most persecuted creatures on Earth. — Sy Montgomery

When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are. — Eileen Myles

In 'We Were the Mulvaneys,' animals are almost as important as people. I wanted to show the tenderness in our relationships with cats, dogs, and horses. Especially cats. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives- the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat- are, likewise, more complicated than we thought. — Hal Herzog

I've known several men who believe women are only interested in relationships for money and comfort, and they aren't capable of really loving. And I've known women who insist men only want sex and don't know how to love. White people used to insist that blacks weren't capable of 'noble' emotions, that they were little more than animals. The same was said about Jews, Native Americans, you name it. It's an ancient argument. People keep dredging it up, trying to prove to themselves that people they don't understand are alien and don't warrant being treated well. And it is always - always - wrong. Despite our differences, all people are basically built from the same template. We are all equally admirable and equally flawed. — Jamie Fessenden

HOW DO YOU FIND THE RIGHT POSITION
TO LIE DOWN WITH PEOPLE
OR EVEN ANIMALS?
OFTEN ONE OF THE PARTNERS IS
SMOTHERED OR CONTORTED.
WHEN DONE PROPERLY, THOUGH,
EVERYONE IS HAPPY. — Jenny Holzer

I wish for you four animals: a mink on the shoulders, a Jaguar in the garage, a tiger in the bedroom, and a jackass to pay for it all. To you! — John Oldale

The most evident difference between man and animals is this: the beast, in as much as it is largely motivated by the senses and with little perception of the past or future, lives only for the present. But man, because he is endowed with reason by which he is able to perceive relationships, sees the causes of things, understands the reciprocal nature of cause and effect, makes analogies, easily surveys the whole course of his life, and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society, and other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complementary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complementary relationships in nuclear families, and it's tearing us apart. — Erick Erickson

Natural warmth is our shared capacity to love, to have empathy, to have a sense of humor. It is also our capacity to feel gratitude and appreciation and tenderness. It's the whole gamut of what often are called the heart qualities, qualities that are a natural part of being human. Natural warmth has the power to heal all relationships - the relationship with ourselves as well as with people, animals, and all that we encounter every day of our lives. — Pema Chodron

Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory. For when the individual is defined and felt as the separate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns - called animals, plants, insects, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of "I" do not effectively include these relationships. You say, "I came into this world." You didn't; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree. — Alan W. Watts

I thought," Shad said slowly, "that she was offended if you referred to Blind Seer or Elation as her pets."
"True," Derian assured him. "Absolutely the correct etiquette - to her face. However, well ... When I first met Firekeeper, less than a year ago, her relationships with animals fell into pretty much two categories: those you ate and those you befriended. I remember that she thought we were pretty clever for bringing horses along so we wouldn't need to hunt our meat. It took me a while to show her they had other uses. — Jane Lindskold

Make no mistake, your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other. To live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks. — Ryan Bingham