Animal Socialization Quotes

A lot of cats are not that social.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.

I always thought of deer as solitary animals that weren't very interesting. But my goodness, that was very wrong. The big eye-opener for me was that they're social. They have family groups.

Dogs are not 'people' of another species. They are another species. To train and care for them properly, to show them how to live in our complex world, requires first and foremost that we understand that.

Not only was it necessary to get the gorillas accustomed to the bluejeaned creature who had become a part of their daily lives, it was also very necessary for me to know and recognize the particular animals of each group as the amazing individuals they were.

The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

I have come to know Bugs so well that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation.

You can't train a penguin to act. You kind of have to take what you get.

In the early '50s, my great-grandmother and grandfather raised a baby gorilla named Bobo who wore clothes and played with the neighborhood kids.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

I always compare human beings to animals. It's a nice way to figure out who they are.

Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally.

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.

In a dog social cue from a master can override where he saw the being placed. That won’t happen unless we have bred a social in tune animal, that’s what a dog is. That’s why they got so much trouble with separation anxiety – you leave them home alone and they’re chewing up the house and stuff. A lot of dogs don’t handle being home alone very well.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

Back in Australia, I did foster care for sick cats for years, and I was always most successful with the animals when I was given two - a brother and sister.

Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.

Scientists have shown that pigs are capable of playing simple video games, learning from each other, and even learning names.

Most exotic animals are not particularly interested in people, which makes it hard to provoke them. Human-rearing gets them used to and sometimes imprinted on humans, which makes them potentially dangerous.

Dogs are joiners; if they were guys, their idea of a good time would be to attend an Elks luncheon.

Even cats grow lonely and anxious.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

There's something to be said for going to a shelter and checking out the adults first because you can really get to know the personalities of the animals. Whereas when you get a puppy or kitten, you don't really know what you're going to end up getting.