Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Sheep are never going to talk to you about cricket.

Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

Dogs are the only mammals that will actually stare and look into a human's eyes.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.

The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

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.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

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

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

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

I'm in the role of helping these apes negotiate the human role. I'm just a temporary intermediary in what I think will be eventual communication between the two species.

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

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!

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren't the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

If dogs could talk it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.

I have come to know Bugs so well that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation.

Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means... nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can.

Scientists have shown that pigs are capable of playing simple video games, learning from each other, and even learning names.