Top 53 Quotes & Sayings by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Besides individual things like thunder and gunshots, what dogs fear most is not belonging, being alone.

Once you're known to be an alcoholic, that's how many people identify you, which could be a reason not to talk about it.

We used to go in the woods by ourselves, and you can't help noticing the world then, especially animals. People used to know a lot about the natural world, especially in the country.

People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.

Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom. But dogs feel it as peace.

You have to be able to love members of your own species before you can branch out and apply that to other species.

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.

Every day, the humane societies execute thousands of dogs who tried all their lives to do their very best by their owners. These dogs are killed not because they are bad but because they are inconvenient. So as we need God more than he needs us, dogs need us more than we need them, and they know it.

Hundreds of species are facing extinction due to human impacts on the environment.

When we became sedentary, lived indoors, and started to raise livestock, we began to see wolves not as occasional fur-bearers or fellow hunters but as robbers.

Every dog might wish to be Dog One, but like us, most dogs want membership in the group even more than they want supremacy over others.

Dogs who live in each other's company are calm and pragmatic, never showing the desperate need to make known their needs and feelings or to communicate their observations, as some hysterical dogs who know only the company of our species are likely to do.

Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.

No other creatures of the savannah sleep as deeply or as soundly as lions, but after all, lions are the main reason for not sleeping soundly.

As far as I'm concerned, I own my dogs as I own my body. My legs are with me when I take a shower, and I feel no shame. If I were to lose one, I'd grieve, and people would send sympathy cards, but it would be my condition that evoked the sympathy, not the fate of the leg. That's like losing a dog.

Many expressions of a cat's feelings seem deeply related to the capture of live prey.

With all due respect to the nation's fish and game departments, more deer die because people hunt them than because people feed them.

Dogs are a window on the natural world.

Barring some competition from whales, wolves are probably America's most popular wild animal. Wolves are also contenders for America's most unpopular wild animal, with perhaps some competition from coyotes.

People acquire a dog, don't understand it, can't train it, get fed up, and... offer it for adoption, hoping to pass on the problem to somebody else. But nobody wants a problem dog.

The story of cats is a story of meat.

Veterinarians are essential allies to the millions of us who experience the human-animal bond.

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.

When I was very young, my nanny was a big Newfoundland dog... whose task was to keep me from drowning.

All the members of the dog family - domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, dingoes - are very aware of territory. A group must control its own territory - you can't have others taking it from you, because then you won't have enough food.

If you don't have manufactured items or anything we think of as 'civilization,' then you're living according to your species.

You can look at your dog and see that it's thinking and has strong feelings. And if it does, so do wolves. And if wolves do, so do elephants. People aren't the only beings that think and feel.

In my cosmology, indigenous wild deer are more important than exotic ornamental shrubs.

We fill the woods with invasive primates camouflaged to look like piles of leaves who sneak around, sprinkling estrus doe urine and manipulating gadgets that sound like antlers clashing.

This was what you did in the '50s: You get married, get a job, put your husband through graduate school, and have two kids - a girl and a boy.

The relationships we have with dogs seem simple enough and often are taken for granted. But these relationships can be deep and mysterious, and not at all simple.

I don't mind aging - I'm glad to be aging. I'll never die young.

Not even a maggot is an it, and to refer to any animal in that manner is an affectation, an ignorant stab at science-speak.

We may never find a way to live in suburbia with deer as we do with raccoons, say, or squirrels. So for this reason, it's very important that we make sure always to save enough wild or open land so that they can live in their normal manner.

Dogs like to learn stuff, if not from another dog, then people are OK... They love activity, playing, interesting walks, and just belonging, being together.

From the very dawn of time until now and well into the future... human-animal companionship is at the very core of our instincts not only for mutual survival, but mutually rewarding relationships.

I would like to visit a dog's mind to know what he's thinking and feeling.

The dogs and I are a single thing, and thus we share our interests. With them, I'm bigger and better than I am without them, and vice versa.

People are perfectly glad to accept the idea that dogs love us, so they must be able to love each other.

To sit idly, not doing, merely experiencing, comes hard to a primate.

Animals need to understand other species, if only to prey on them or escape from them.

One of the best and most responsible things a scientist can do is to write for the popular press.

We are surely the primary agent of death for all members of the cat tribe. For many if not most cat species, our depredations must surpass accidents, disease, and even starvation by a considerable margin.

What do dogs want? They want each other. Human beings are merely a cynomorphic substitute.

To write a book such as Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn is a formidable undertaking. You must accumulate thousands of facts and spare no detail, no matter how terrible. It is always easier to write a piece of fluff and leave everybody smiling. But then, the horrors of poaching would continue unchallenged?like as tent caterpillars consuming an apple orchard, our species mindlessly consumes the others of the earth. At present, the most significant hope for our planet may be knowledge, and Richard Ellis has done a heroic job in providing a large measure of that.

I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.

We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.

As the cherub is to the angel, so the cat is to the tiger.

No cat purrs unless someone is around to listen.

Dogs who chase cars evidently see them as large, unruly ungulates badly in need of discipline and shepherding.

People can be a fine substitute for other dogs. But I think that if they had to choose, dogs by and large would choose the company of other dogs.

In the past even scientists have been led to believe that only human beings have thoughts or emotions. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth... After all, thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value.

In truth, most of us don't know our cats.