To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
The problem with experiments has always been that human beings make the decisions on whether or not the animals have benefitted from the treatment.
What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we see. Humans seem to take...
Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with fro...
Anthropomorphism originally meant the attribution of human characteristics to God. It is curious that the word is now used almost exclusively to ascribe human characteristics--such as fidelity or altruism or pride, or emotions such as love, embarrass...
Somewhere between poetry and science, somewhere between heaven and earth, clairaudience is born. Clairaudience is the sweetest mystery any human being could ever experience. Fortunately, it is the most contagious, too. Most, if not all, of my student...
If you must give me a label, then label me a human being. I have no pride in being a human, though, because I have nothing to do with my becoming one. But, whereas animals don't have a rational code of ethics, I like to think I do. Which is where I a...
Monsters’ can help us by giving a tangible form to our secret fears. It is less widely appreciated today that ‘wonders’ such as the unicorn legitimize our hopes. But all imaginary animals, to some degree all animals, are ultimately both monster...
Humans are destructive animals, but they are also wise ones.
People are very harsh critics of animated humans.
Human beings are the most successful of animals because of their capability to learn, and an abused animal learns very quickly to defend itself. It also learns very quickly to trust very few people - if any.
Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?
He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it.
Confining marine animals to tanks and separating them from their families and their natural surroundings, just so people can watch them swim in endless circles, teaches us far more about humans than it does about animals - and the lesson is not a fla...
I think that now that we are seeing multimedia types of productions with videos and pictures and human beings performing the acts that animals used to perform, such as in Cirque du Soleil and other traveling troops, there is no need to parade animals...
I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there...
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.
Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of 'experiments' banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and...
We know very well that we have ancestors. But our ancestors are not only human. We have animal ancestors; we have plant ancestors; and we have mineral ancestors. Our human ancestors are still very young. Human beings appeared very late in the history...
An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a bio...
