Sy Montgomery Quotes

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.

Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

Farm animals are just as interesting and intelligent as the dogs and cats who we know a bit betterYet they are treated by the meat industry as though they are inanimate objects with no feelings or personalities.

Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals.

The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous.

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.

Animals are thinking, feeling creatures. They're sensitive.

When I'd written my 'Silverwing' series - I'd imbued the bats with full human awareness and vocabulary.

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

Animals in general have sparked a weird depression in me, because as much as I tried, I couldn't layer a personality over them. You know what I mean? I would stare at the cows, and I would sing to the cows, and they would always just look at me blankly.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

I've always had a fascination for animals. I loved watching them, and even then I thought of them as beings rather than pets. I call it a birth affect!

The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.

If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.

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.

Not even a maggot is an it, and to refer to any animal in that manner is an affectation, an ignorant stab at science-speak.

The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man - whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.

Anytime you work with animals, you begin to see more humanity in them.

A lifelong intimacy with animals has got me out of the common notion that they are automata with a slight infusion of intelligence in their composition. The mind in beast and bird, as in man, is the main thing.