Michelle Paver Quotes

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

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.

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.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

I never thought I could learn much from a dog or cat. They sleep when we sleep. They eat when we eat. I'm into observing animals being as wild as they can be in a captive environment.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.

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'm not a propagandist, I'm not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.

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.

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.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

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

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

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.

Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild creatures, and their cognizance of the affairs of their own kind.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

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.

You know, if you have a zoo you don't want the other creatures to see you. You want them to hang out and act properly and, you know, when the monkeys will come and ask for the bananas, they won't act like monkeys. If you want them to act on what their true nature is, you've got to leave them alone.

Hunters and trackers learn not only to understand intellectually a bunch of facts about the animal they follow, but to feel their way into the very being of the animal.