Animal Cognition Quotes

We treat our dogs as if they were "almost human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end.

If you have a dog or a cat, you know how developed they can be. How sensitive, how aware. They suffer. We all do.

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

Dogs have not the power of comparing. A dog will take a small piece of meat as readily as a large, when both are before him.

Animals have personalities and minds and emotions.

Fish aren't smart. It's not like they have advanced degrees.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.

What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It's an unfortunate parallel to human behavior - they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

Hunters and trackers learn not only to understand intellectually a bunch of facts about the animal they follow, but to feel their way into the very being of the animal.

How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

Some dogs act like people and some people act like dogs.

Of course animals have a personality and emotions.

The idea of the nest in the bird's mind, where does it come from?

Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.

If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.