Marc Bekoff Quotes

Often, the greater our ignorance about something, the greater our resistance to change.

Although other animals may be different from us, this does not make them LESS than us

A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!

Human beings are a part of the animal kingdom, not apart from it. The separation of "us" and "them" creates a false picture and is responsible for much suffering. It is part of the in-group/out-group mentality that leads to human oppression of the weak by the strong as in ethic, religious, political, and social conflicts.

When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout. Animals' emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow.

Let us remember that animals are not mere resources for human consumption. They are splendid beings in their own right, who have evolved alongside us as co-inheritors of all the beauty and abundance of life on this planet

Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a "right" to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals' pain in our hearts.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.

These enthusiasts often like to hang signs that say "Gone Fishin'" or "Gone Huntin'". But what these slogans really mean is "Gone Killing.

Hunting and fishing involve killing animals with devices (such as guns) for which the animals have not evolved natural defenses. No animal on earth has adequate defense against a human armed with a gun, a bow and arrow, a trap that can maim, a snare that can strangle, or a fishing lure designed for the sole purpose of fooling fish into thinking they have found something to eat

Some people say they love animals and yet harm them nonetheless; I'm glad those people don't love me.

Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we're alienated from the rich, diverse, and magnificent world in which we live.

Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions, we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form deep and enduring social bonds with many other beings. Emotions are the glue that binds.

Many animals experience pain, anxiety and suffering, physically and psychologically, when they are held in captivity or subjected to starvation, social isolation, physical restraint, or painful situations from which they cannot escape. Even if it is not the same experience of pain, anxiety, or suffering undergone by humans- or even other animals, including members of the same species- an individual's pain, suffering, and anxiety matter.

We must remain hopeful that a universal ethic of courage, caring, sharing, respect, radical compassion, and love will make a difference even if we do not see the positive results of our efforts... We can never be too generous or too kind.

All animals, including humans, have a right to lives of dignity and respect, without forced intrusions.

We generally accept that it's natural for carnivorous wild animals to kill other animals in order to live. But people don't often think (or even know) about the extraordinary and unnatural suffering that humans inflict on the animals that we freely harvest for food, with the help of modern high technology and the animal food sciences.

Emotions are the gifts of our ancestors. We have them and so do other animals. We must never forget this.

Silence is the enemy of social change.

Our interactions with animals tell us a good deal about how we perceive ourselves, who we are as animals. Our interactions with animals run deep, and in very pragmatic ways, these interactions affect both ourselves and the animals involved. Simply put, when we harm other animals we hurt ourselves, and when we protect and nurture other animals, we heal ourselves.

​Marc Bekoff, ‘Observations of Scent-Marking and Discriminating Self from Others by a Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris): Tales of Displaced Yellow Snow’, Behavioral Processes 55:2 (2011), 75–9.

Ecologist Paul Ehrlich stressed that people who hold opposing opinions need to engage in open discussion with well-reasoned dissent. Positions should be questioned and criticized, not the people who hold them. Personal attacks preclude open discussion because, once someone is put on the defensive, fruitful exchanges are impossible, at least for the moment.

Why is it that blood, rather than peace, sells?

...rewilding is all about being nice, kind, compassionate, empathic, and harnessing our inborn goodness and optimism. We must all work together at this. It's about time we focus on the good side of human and animal nature. ... nature offers many lessons for kinder society. Blood shouldn't sell.

When we say to someone, "Oh you're behaving like an animal," it's actually a compliment rather than an insult. We need to work for a science of peace and build a culture of empathy, and emphasize the positive, pro-social side of the character of other animals and ourselves. It's truly who we and other animals are.

Surely it is our animal nature that recognizes the divinity of the natural world in all its mystery and beauty, despite the distressing habits and limited perception that afflict our species. So perhaps our hope of redemption lies in the fact that we are animals, not that we are people. -Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Certain Poor Shepherds

In my own field, I know that solid science can easily be done with ethics and compassion. There's nothing wrong with compassionate or sentimental science or scientists. Studies of animal thought, emotions, and self-awareness, as well as behavioral ecology and conservation biology, can all be compassionate as well as scientifically rigorous. Science and the ethical treatment of animals aren't incompatible. We can do solid science with an open mind and a big heart. I encourage everyone to go where their hearts take them, with love, not fear. If we all travel this road, the world will be a better place for all beings. Kinder and more humane choices will be made when we let our hearts lead the way. Compassion begets compassion and caring for and loving animals spills over into compassion and caring for humans. The umbrella of compassion is very important to share freely and widely.

Las preocupaciones por el bienestar se concentran habitualmente en prevenir o aliviar el sufrimiento y en asegurarse de que los animales están bien alimentados y cuidados, sin cuestionarse las condiciones subyacentes de cautividad o encierro que constituyen la naturaleza real de sus vidas.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." -Henry Beston

As Johnson suggests, "The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.

Humans are a part of nature not apart from nature.

see DPFL’s video, “The Playgroup Change,” which

Although other animals may be different from us, this does not make them less than us.

These animal activities remind Grandin of autistic children who sometimes bite their own hands, bang their heads on walls, or slap themselves. She argues that 10 to 15 percent of captive rhesus monkeys housed alone do the exact same thing. She may be right, but Grandin's comparison of autistic children to abnormally behaving animals is controversial. She has categorized autism as a way station on the road from animals to humans, implying that autistic children may be closer to animals than the rest of us, an assertion that uncomfortably echoes the Victorian idea that certain groups of humans are closer to animals than others. Even if they rock back and forth like upset monkeys do, autistic children aren't more closely related to other animals than nonautistic children. There is, however, the possibility that other animals can be autistic. And if so, autistic humans and autistic nonhumans may have some things in common. The ethologist Marc Bekoff once observed a wild coyote pup he called Harry. Harry's littermates rolled and tumbled, snarling at one another joyfully, but Harry didn't understand their invitations to tussle and didn't seem to know how to play at all. Despite his best efforts, the pup couldn't read coyote social cues. For a long time I simply chalked it up to individual variation, wrote Bekoff, figuring that since behavior among members of the same species can vary, Harry wasnțt all that surprising. But a few years later, someone asked him if he thought other animals could be autistic and Bekoff remembered the odd little pup. Perhaps, he wrote, Harry suffered from coyote autism. In 2013, biologists at Caltech took a group of anxious lab mice with poor social skills and stereotypic behaviors and dosed them with a gut microbe, Bacteroides fragilis. Their anxiety seemed to lessen, they appeared to communicate better with one another, and they spent less time engaging in odd behaviors. The researchers concluded that the bacteria might help more than mice and suggested that people with developmental disorders like autism should try taking probiotics. This study built on earlier research, also at Caltech, that linked autism spectrum disorders to intestinal problems in both mice and humans. Mice who squeaked at other mice in strange ways, for example, had less Bacteroides fragilis in their intestines. So did humans with autism. The lack of this bacteria may not cause autism but adding it back in may help animals with their symptoms.

After decades of research, Panksepp is convinced that most animal brains, from Oliver's to a ticklish mouse's, likely have the capacity for dreaming, for taking pleasure in eating, for feeling anger, fear, love, lust, grief, and acceptance from their mothers, for being playful, and for some conception of selfhood, an argument that might have seemed painfully unscientific just forty years ago. Panksepp believes that emotional capacity evolved in mammals long before the emergence of the human neocortex and its massive powers of cognition. He is careful to say that this doesn't mean that all animal or even mammalian emotions are the same. And when it comes to complex cognitive skills, he believes that the human brain puts all others to shame. But he is convinced that other animals have many special abilities that we don't have and this may extend to emotional states. Rats, for example, have richer olfactory lives, eagles have impressive eyesight, and dolphins can sense the world via sight, sound, sonar, and touch. These abilities may translate into more and different feelings associated with their various sensory or cognitive experiences. Panksepp believes that rabbits, for example, may have bigger or different capacities for fear while cats may have larger capacities for aggression and anger. Over the past fifteen years the cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff has published accounts of many types of animal emotions, from compassionate chimps to contrite hyenas. The primatologist Frans de Waal has written of altruism, empathy, and morality in bonobos and other apes. An explosion of recent research on dogs plumbs their ability to mirror the emotions of their owners, and studies of hormonal fluctuations in baboons after the death of their troops' babies have shown monthlong spikes of glucocorticoid stress hormones in the mothers, chemical surges that point toward a long grieving process. A number of recent studies have gone far beyond our closest relatives to argue for the possible emotional capacities of honeybees, octopi, chickens, and even fruit flies. The results of these studies are changing debates about animal minds from "Do they have emotions?"What sorts of emotions do they have and why?" Perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio has argued, emotions are a necessary part of animal social behavior. Consciously or not, they guide our behavior, helping us to flee from danger, seek pleasure, avoid pain, or bond with the right fellow creatures. Both dolphins and parrots, for example, can exhibit symptoms similar to human sadness and depression after the loss of a companion. They might ignore food or refuse to play with others. Other social animals, like dogs, often do the same. These emotions are consequences of a very helpful evolutionary process: attaching to others who protect you, feed you, play with you, groom you, hunt or forage with you, or otherwise make your life more enjoyable or productive. Affective states, as the emotional expressions of animals are known, are useful whether you're a prairie dog collaborating with other prairie dogs on a tunnel extension or a harried human negotiating who is going to pick up dinner on the way home from work.