Quotes & Sayings About Zoo Animals

Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild. — Jack Hanna

Zoo is inhuman, it is unethical, and it is sick and stupid! Just because children and their ignorant parents go and have some fun there, slavery and torture cannot be justified! A society which has zoos does not deserve to be free! You deserve freedom only if you let others to be free, including animals! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

More than just a zoo, the Animal Kingdom is an extraordinary experience of animals, rides and performances. The exhibits have the scale and creativity you associate with Disney. The African safari ride is terrific and worth riding several times. — Newt Gingrich

Mitt Romney is quite a guy. At one point he and his wife bought a zoo and fired all the animals. — David Letterman

We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional. — Germaine Greer

Oh, I hope I don't teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children, and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won't learn the obvious lesson. — Chris Cleave

No one who has lived side by side with animals that have plenty of room can ever visit the zoo. — Peter Hoeg

A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

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

To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business. — Yann Martel

Zoos have always fascinated me. What child hasn't wondered what would happen if all the animals escaped from the zoo? Or what would happen if they got caught in an enclosure? — Matthew Reilly

Europe enjoyed a heritage of fairy tales alive with talking animals--some almost real, other deliciously bogus-- to spark child's fantasies and gallop grownups to the cherished haunts of childhood. It pleased Antonina that her zoo offered on orient of fabled creatures, where book pages sprang alive and people could parley with ferocious animals. — Diane Ackerman

They think I may be dangerous, and I am, but not in the way they fear. I have tasted of Paradise. Not because I wanted to. I didn't want to. But it has borne down upon me and there is no escaping it any more. All Things Are Possible. It bears down upon everyone and we run from it as hard as we can and many manage to keep it at bay, but I have not, I am condemned, now, never ... to settle ... for the lesser ... ever ... again. And yes, that makes me a dangerous man.
They think I have become one of the wild animals at the zoo, and I have become one of the wild animals at the zoo.
This is a great day. — Michael Ventura

I like to do chill things on dates. I think it would be fun to go to the zoo. I know it's really weird and random, but I love animals. It'd be like a day of doing silly things, while enjoying nature. — Ashlee Simpson

I'm a dog lover and sex addict. Those two things are unrelated. — Dark Jar Tin Zoo

What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature--which is worth a hundred in any Zoo--must derive their knowledge of God's creatures from their appearance in prisons. ... How do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage? — Dhan Gopal Mukerji

The surprise of animals ... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo. — Elizabeth Janeway

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors ... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. — Temple Grandin

I'm not sure I'd like to be burned. I think I might like to be fed to zoo animals. It would be both environmentally friendly and a lovely treat for the larger carnivores. Could you request that? — Gail Honeyman

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer. — Melvin Burgess

Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals. — Alison Lurie

Somewhere in the world, a lion wakes up every morning not knowing what it's going to eat. Every day, it finds food. The lion isn't worried - it just does what it needs to do. Somewhere else, in a zoo, a caged lion sits around every day and waits for a zookeeper. The lion is comfortable. It gets to relax. It's not worried much, either. Both of these animals are lions. Only one is a king. — Julien Smith

Know your load. That's rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I'm not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando two
birds short of a dinner party ... I know I'm pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less. — Jacob M. Appel

After dinner or lunch or whatever it was
with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what
I said, Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let's give it up. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Let's go to the zoo. Let's look at animals. Let's drive down and look at the ocean. It's only 45 minutes. Let's play games in the arcades. Let's go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let's have friends. Let's laugh. This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us. — Charles Bukowski

Mom is talking to Jack. "I hear you're interested in zoo animals."
I snort. There's a sentence you don't hear too often. I fake an insulted sigh.
"Well, thank-you, Mother. Yes, I'm hungry, but you don't have to be so honest about it. Your tact is amazing. — Erynn Mangum

Within a few months Mitch Bush, head veterinarian at the National Zoo, and David Wildt, a young reproductive physiologist working as a postdoctoral fellow in my laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, were on a plane bound for South Africa. Bush is a towering, bearded, giant of a man with a strong interest and acumen in exotic animal veterinary medicine, particularly the rapidly improving field of anesthetic pharmacology. Wildt is a slight and modest Midwestern farm boy, schooled in the reproductive physiology of barnyard animals. His boyish charm and polite shy demeanor mask a piercing curiosity and deep knowledge of all things reproductive. Bush and Wildt's expedition to the DeWildt cheetah breeding center outside Pretoria would ultimately change the way the conservation community viewed cheetahs forever. — Stephen J. O'Brien

Humankind devotes much of its collective energy to managing personal and institutional anxiety and dealing with unsuccessful efforts of its civilians to cope with the tides of shifting social and economic conditions. Every city corridor houses downtrodden citizens whom have given up on life, the dopers, smoke hounds, crack heads, and unrepentant drunkards whom spend their days pushing shopping carts and their nights sleeping in gutters. In marked contrast to these filthy and wretched souls whom inhabit the skid row of every city's streets, all animals display an admirable state of hygiene and a zest for life. Except for poor critters sentenced to live confined in a zoo and domestic animals held captives in deplorable harvesting pens, all animals live a carefree existence that is preferable to living off stress sandwiches of modern humankind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity. — Andrey Kurkov

We live in a zoo, and we get to share all our animals with the people who come in. We really put our animals first, and then the staff, and then the visitors. The animals aren't pacing; they're all happy. When you touch an animal, it ultimately touches you. — Bindi Irwin

I always wanted to be a zookeeper when I was growing up, and I've wound up a zookeeper! I've been working with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years! I'm the luckiest old broad on two feet because my life is divided absolutely in half - half animals and half show business. You can't ask for better than two things you love the most. — Betty White

So for some reason everybody makes this huge deal about pandas. I don't know why. They never actually do anything except eat and poop. But they're really famous." "Yeah," said Suzana. "They're like the Kardashians of zoo animals. — Dave Barry

The animals in the zoo-those that had not been stolen in previous administrations-were slain or left to starve. One zealous, perhaps mad, Taliban jumped into a bear's cage and cut off his nose, reputedly because the animal's "beard" was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion's den and cried out, "I am the lion now!" The lion killed him. Another Taliban solider threw a grenade into the den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived Taliban rule. — Lawrence Wright

When I draw it, I'm going to make my skin see-through and what you'll see is that all the animals in the zoo of me have broken out of their cages. — Jandy Nelson

For me, "Zoo" has always been a fable. It has nothing to do with realism. It's a fable about what man is doing to the world, and the animals have retribution. But in the real world, this would not happen. But in the world of 1984, this kind of thing can happen in a story. — James Patterson

To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs. — Augusten Burroughs

At school, our classroom had a small rodent zoo consisting of two rabbits, three hamsters, a litter of baby gerbils and a guinea pig. At first, I'd thought the teacher was raising snack food, which impressed me, being the first sign of intelligence she'd shown. Soon, though, I'd figured out the animals' true purpose and left them alone, though I would never understand the appeal of petting and coddling perfectly good food. — Kelley Armstrong

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

If you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory. — Yann Martel

I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with 'we' I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public. — Frans De Waal

Andrej thought about it - the notion that the
world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren't. — Sonya Hartnett

Michael Crichton comments, "Animals raised in isolation, without parents, without guidance, were not fully functional. Zoo animals frequently could not care for their offspring, because they had never seen it done. They would ignore their infants, or roll over and crush them, or simply become annoyed with them and kill them. . . . Adapative behavior was a kind of morality; it was behavior that had evolved over many generations because it was found to succeed - behavior that allowed members of the species to cooperate, to live together, to hunt, to raise young."59 — Stephen Harrod Buhner

The newspapers do little better. Their coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by "human interest" events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, or by threats to endangered species; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported. — Peter Singer

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything. — Bill McKibben

In zoos, along with the animals, the humanity of man is also prisoned! No cage is humane! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Well, look at it another way: why shouldn't there be cats in a zoo?" I said.
"They're animals, too, right?"
"Cats and dogs are your run-of-the-mill-type animals. Nobody's going to pay money to see them," he said. "Just look around you-they're everywhere. Same thing with people. — Haruki Murakami

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around. — Ernest Hemingway,

Reverse petting zoo. You pet the animals, and they pet you back. — Andy Biersack

I can definitely tell you what viewers can expect from Season 2 [of 'Zoo']. It picks up right where Season 1 left off - the gang facing this wall of animals charging at a car. And so, it'll be satisfying in that way. The cliffhanger in Season 1 just kind of went to black screen. It picks up right where that left off. And from there on, the stakes just continue to rise in the season, and I think it's really adrenaline-filled. — James Wolk

So I can go and let out everything that I feel about every bogus weekly cover, every single bogus skit, every single rumor and barber shop-everything that people feel is ok to treat celebrities like zoo animals, or act like what they're saying is not serious, or their lives are not serious or their dreams are not serious. — Kanye West

all the animals in the zoo of me have broken out of their cages. "Maybe — Jandy Nelson

I love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus. — Kay Redfield Jamison

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares. — Igor Stravinsky

Politics is the best show in America. I love animals and I love politicians, and I like to watch both of 'em at play, either back home in their native state, or after they've been captured and sent to a zoo, or to Washington. — Will Rogers

We're in 'Jurassic Park' territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we'll have zoos for extinct animals. — Michio Kaku

As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment. — Temple Grandin

But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris. — Ceridwen Dovey

Zookeeper foible #1: Tendency to not equate fur and scale with fracture and scar. — Wendy Beck

As we neared the water, I pointed out an antique taxidermy shop. "My mom and I used to always go in there," I said. "It's like a zoo, except all the animals are dead. — Amy Plum

The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see. — Russell Hoban

Better to honor the pinch of fear than regret the punch of fang. — Wendy Beck

Betty took him for a walk in the zoo and he was amused by her evident belief in the curative power of animals. She seemed to think that it must steady him to look at a buffalo. — Nathanael West

Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals.

A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery. — John N. Gray

A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal - of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania - but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place. Animals are far more flexible than we realize. IF they weren't, they wouldn't have survived. But my opinion about zoos came after research. Initially I had the opinion that most people have, that they are jails. — Yann Martel

Every time you go to the zoo, you prolong the captivity of the animals there! If no one goes to the zoos, there will be no zoos! Destroying the evil is very simple and it is in your hand! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing. — S. Jay Olshansky

Of course I was drawn to the sun bears, they're fascinating. But so are tigers and lots of other animals at the zoo. Probably a big part of the reason I felt so connected to them was because of their name: SUN BEAR. — Matthew Zapruder

For several thousand years man has been in contact with animals whose character and habits have been deformed by domestication. He has ended by believing that he understands them. All he means by this is that he is able to rely on certain reflex actions which he himself has implanted in them. He will flatter himself at times on the grasp of animal psychology which has brought him the love of the dog and the purr of the cat; and on the strength of such assumptions he approaches the beasts of the jungle. The old tag about nature being an open book is just not true. What nature offers on a first examination may appear to be simple but it is never as simple as it appears. — Hans Brick

I have the best daddy in the whole world, and I will miss him every day. When I see a crocodile, I will always think of him, and I know that Daddy made this zoo so everyone could come and learn to love all the animals. — Bindi Irwin

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam. — Michael Chabon

I don't have time for lie-on-the-beach vacations. I'm a zoo person. There's one in New Jersey where animals actually come up to your car. I love the monkeys - I used to give them bubblegum to chew. — Missy Elliot

The zoo kills the 'wild' in wild animal. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e.g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role — Peter Frederick Strawson

Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time. — Diane Ackerman

There's the famous quote that if you want to understand how animals live, you don't go to the zoo, you go to the jungle. The Future Lab has really pioneered that within Lego, and it hasn't been a theoretical exercise. It's been a real design-thinking approach to innovation, which we've learned an awful lot from. — Jorgen Vig Knudstorp

The only place that work and motion are the same thing is the zoo where people pay to see the animals move around — Taiichi Ohno

Welcome to Hollywood, a land just off the coast of planet Earth. I am never quite certain if I am visiting the zoo, or if I'm one of the animals in a cage. — Elinor Glyn

What do the animals do in the zoo? That's the same thing that I do in my cell. I play with myself. I make little string dolls. I talk to roaches. I'm in jail for nine counts of murder, and I didn't do it. I'm in solitary confinement, may I add. — Charles Manson

Zoological Parks South of Florida
"Cuba has several zoos, the largest of which are in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. The Havana National Zoo is dedicated to going beyond the mere display of animals and attempts to maintain a more natural habitat, supporting and promoting breeding programs for various species with follow-up scientific research programs." — Hank Bracker

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. — John Berger

I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want. — Kristen Schaal

I was always fascinated with animals and I wanted to go to the zoo all the time. When I got older and I realized the animals bite, and when they do, most of the time you don't survive it kind of crushed my dream and now I just want to WATCH Discovery Channel. — Marcus Hudson

Whatever the reason for wanting to escape, sane or insane, zoo detractors should realize that animals don't escape to somewhere but from something. — Yann Martel

There was only so much damage control I could do, and no amount of bull crap about escaped animals from the zoo was going to mask my very public display of power. — Pippa DaCosta

Enjoy your little field trip to the zoo - and, yes, some of the animals here do bite. — Jane Davitt

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

WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn't participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. "Let's pretend we're animals" was forgotten, and we were animals. We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we're not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we're free. We've forgotten that we're free. — Russell Brand

I'm in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo. — Betty White

Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.
— Cees Nooteboom

For actors in Hollywood, it's very straightforward. We're well-paid animals in a zoo. — Robin Wright

A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence: exactly where an animal says to us, "Stay out!" ... we say to it, "Stay in!" with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other. — Yann Martel

It is a fact that if an impulse from one or the other sphere comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse.
For instance, a man has a feeling impulse to say something positive to someone and he blocks it off through some inhibition. He might then dream that he had a spontaneous feeling impulse on the level of a child and his conscious purpose had smashed it. The human is still there, but as a hurt child. Should he do that habitually for five years, he would no longer dream of a child who had been hurt but of a zoo full of raging wild animals in a cage.
An impulse which is driven back loads up with energy and becomes inhuman. This fact, according to Dr. Jung, demonstrates the independent existence of unconscious. — Marie-Louise Von Franz

It is a science fact that some animals do dream.
It'll someday lead them to places better than zoo. — Toba Beta

I think of most pro athletes as these creatures that are just there for my amusement, like animals in a zoo, or gladiators fighting for me, their king. — A.D. Aliwat