Jon Katz Quotes

You don't know what mental telepathy exists from the human to the animal.

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

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.

The dog is almost human in its demand for living interest, yet fatally less than human in its inability to foresee.

There ain't a man livin' who hasn't talked to his dog.

Cats can't understand English, so you tell a cat, 'Come on. Jump on the bed,' and he just looks at you like, 'What are you talking about?'

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

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

Lots of people talk to animals... Not very many listen, though... That's the problem.

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

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!

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

Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at.

Pet lovers know that animals sometimes understand us better than we do, and the annals of human sin and desire provide plenty of stories to drive the point home.

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.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Horses do sense things way before people.

Sheep are never going to talk to you about cricket.

I would like to visit a dog's mind to know what he's thinking and feeling.

I treat my cat like she's my therapist or something, because I talk to her all the time, and as she's gotten older, she talks back. It's pretty funny.

There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.

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?

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.

I grew up with lots of animals and I related more to them than I did to people. I feel a lot of empathy for them.

If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with people.