Gerald Durrell Quotes

Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild.

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.

My job, my mission, what I have been put on this planet for is to save wildlife.

I've visited Lincoln Park Zoo more times than I can count because I believe the more the public learns about our animals, plants and environment, the better equipped we are to play a leading role in protecting our planet.

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.

I love zoo sanctuaries.

All zoos are both beguiling and repellent.

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

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

Endangered species are our friends.

I'm in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo.

There was no way that I could explain to dogs, friends, or parents my compelling need to return to Africa to launch a long-term study of the gorillas.

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.

I wanted to go into the tropics and save animals - and write, of course.

I was always into animals and animal protection, ever since I was growing up.

I must stress, basically, the very fact that we do have orangutan rehabilitation means that we have failed to do what is really important, and that is rescue the wild orangutan in its habitat.

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.

Again and again we are confronted with the reality - some might say the problem - of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins.

I hate zoos.

We're feeding all these zoos. And that's getting bigger and bigger.

Animals weren't put on this earth to entertain us.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

I always wanted to be a zoologist. I'm fascinated with animals. I wanted to be a zookeeper.

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 like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.