Jeff Van Drew Quotes

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.

For sure, all over Poland, kids had my picture of a lemur on their bedroom wall - but the chances are they may never get to see a real lemur in Madagascar. I thought this was great and it really meant a lot to me.

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

I always said it was to be dumb enough to do what Marlon Perkins said to do.

We have a moral responsibility to save wild places like the arctic refuge for future generations, and that is why our country has remained committed to its protection for nearly 50 years.

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.

The illegal wildlife trade has an unacceptable human cost for those who have lived for centuries in harmony with wildlife.

Since I was a kid, I inherited my dad's love for animals and wildlife, even for the ones we had around the house in the French countryside, a 'smaller' kind of nature. Then, as I grew up, I looked more deeply into the African continent and its wildlife.

The Safari Club International has worked the legal system hard to try to keep polar bears - threatened primarily by climate change, but also by hunting - on the list of creatures people can import as trophies after shooting.

In the 1970s, Safari Club International asked the federal government to approve its import of 1,125 not-yet-killed trophies of 40 endangered species, including gorillas, orangutans and tigers, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

There is no good scientific reason to bring back an extinct species. Why would one bring them back? To put them in a theme park?

I have no fear of losing my life - if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.

The first crocodile I ever caught was at nine years of age, and it was a rescue.

China is responsible for a lot of the major conservation issues we're facing. It's the main market for rhino horn. Tigers are being killed for tiger bone wine. They're driving the tropical timber trade and illegal logging in Indonesia, and the trade in tropical reef fish.

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.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

Animal lover that I am, a cougar I am not.

It's so fantastic that Prince William has championed African wildlife. He's putting his back into it - and one thing the royal family is brilliant at is getting people to cough up.

People are beginning to realize that it's important that we see animals in a natural state - but through film, through video, through documentaries, at wildlife preserves, and through other humanely protected ways, which don't involve... performing for us.

My clients are the whales and the seals.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy, but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy.

In Africa, the rangers shoot poachers.

Years ago, it was pretty hard to get people to empathize even a little bit with scaly, cold-blooded critters; now, thanks a lot to good PR from television, it is easier to get the message of reptile conservation and tolerance across. We have a lot to be thankful to reptiles for, not the least of which is their control of rodents.

Whether exotic wild animals have escaped or the owners have let them go, the problem is still there…. The damage has already been done.

I wish that one of my children will be like the Australian guy from the Discovery Channel show. The crocodile hunter.