Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Quotes

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

Anthropomorphism is such an interesting concept. It means projecting human thoughts and emotions onto an animal. Which implies that thoughts and feelings belong to humans alone. Of course, if you believe in evolution, or if you believe in the Bible, that's not so. Both evolution and the Bible tell us that we're part of a family.

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

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

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 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.

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

Farm animals are just as interesting and intelligent as the dogs and cats who we know a bit betterYet they are treated by the meat industry as though they are inanimate objects with no feelings or personalities.

I will be doing a film called Whispers, for Disney. It's about elephants, and doesn't have any people in it. It will be a live action film - I don't know how much I can say about it, since I still don't know too much about it.

Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals.

The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous.

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.

Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'

Every animal has his or her story, his or her thoughts, daydreams, and interests. All feel joy and love, pain and fear, as we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt. All deserve that the human animal afford them the respect of being cared for with great consideration for those interests or left in peace.

Animals are thinking, feeling creatures. They're sensitive.

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.

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

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

There is no evidence that an animal can take on the sophisticated task of deciding to end his life and to communicate that decision to us.

I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want.

Working with animals is always going to be tough because the animal doesn't know it's an actor.

The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.

I'm really an animal guy. I express myself in different ways as an animal.

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.

My mother and dad were big animal lovers, too. I just don't know how I would have lived without animals around me. I'm fascinated by them - both domestic pets and the wild community. They just are the most interesting things in the world to me, and it's made such a difference in my lifetime.