Susan Orlean Quotes

Federal legislation is urgently needed to stop this insanity of wild animals in captivity.

I grew a love for helpless, defenseless things. People would give me lions and jaguars. I had cheetahs, monkeys.

Think about it: You're trying to raise cash to save an endangered animal. You've got orphaned pandas getting 3 trillion YouTube hits, and you've got seals being clubbed over the head by roughnecks. The money flows in. But what about the poor shark?

I love zoo sanctuaries.

Several countries - among them Austria, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, India, Israel and Sweden - ban or severely restrict the use of wild animals in circuses. In Brazil, a movement to ban wild animals from circuses started after hungry lions managed to grab and devour a small boy.

In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.

Yes, I've often been threatened by hunters, by horsemeat butchers, and seal murderers... I am still alive!

You can't just go and collect animals from the wild. It's totally illegal.

Bolivia recently did what every country should do - banned the use of animals in circuses.

There is something about seeing rhinos and lions running free that excites you. It's not that you feel afraid; it's more like you're liberated by seeing them.

I'm not anti-fox hunting because, to me, shooting foxes is even worse and the results are horrendous.

I hope SeaWorld is exploring how, like Ringling, it can get out of the wild animal business.

I don't want to see crocs end up as boots, bags and belts. We're killing and consuming our wildlife icons.

Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild.

I did not actually run down a deer for 'Tammy,' I promise.

I know that Daddy had an important job. He was working to change the world so everyone would love wildlife like he did. He built a hospital to help animals, and he bought lots of land to give animals a safe place to live.

I'm learning that human pressure on wildlife is becoming increasingly dangerous. You've got to be more alert because more animals have been pushed around, wounded, subjected to human harassment, ambushed, all kinds of stress. When they attack, it's totally predictable.

You see I'm against hunting, in fact I'm a hunt saboteur. I go out the night before and shoot the fox.

We have wild animals in zoos, yet people rarely meet their 'food' face to face.

I used to swim with these beavers in a beaver pond when I was 10. I went back when I was 11 and found there were no more beavers. I found that trappers had taken them all, so I became quite angry, and that winter I began to walk the trap lines and free animals from the traps and destroy the traps.

I don’t give a crap for the pup fish.

I cannot concur with those who advocate saving gorillas from extinction by killing and capturing more free-living individuals only to exhibit them in confinement.

Fur is not luxury: it is an industry of death and suffering.

People get very passionate about saving the whale, but when something like a Florida indigo snake is endangered there are not a lot of people out there holding up placards.

People can't get their heads round the idea of a species surviving; you know, they're more concerned about how you treat a donkey in Sicily or something.