Prefer Dogs To Humans Quotes

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

The path of the norm is the path of least resistance; it is the route we take when we're on auto-pilot and don't even realize we're following a course of action that we haven't consciously chosen. Most people who eat meat have no idea that they're behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call 'free choice' is, in fact, the result of a narrowly obstructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don't realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species' preference for survival.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

I just didn’t like humans in general. They were back-stabbing, disloyal creatures. That’s why I preferred the company of my dogs.

Who doesn't know that the dog is the epitome of devotion? But it's this devotion to humans, so instinctual that it's given freely even to persons who are unworthy of it, that has made me prefer cats. Give me a pet that can get along without me.

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet." (The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948)

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf’s below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows’ legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo’s sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies.

Take tail docking…in which the last several inches of a puppy’s tail are removed, usually without anesthesia, sometimes with extremely crude instruments such as scissors or razors. The American Kennel Club (AKC), which develops guidelines used to judge canines in competition, prefers boxers, rottweilers, cocker spaniels, and dogs belonging to dozens of other breeds to have docked tails. In other words, an ideal specimen is one that’s been surgically reshaped by humans.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

Most people who eat meat have no idea that they're behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call “free choice” is, in fact, the result of a narrowly constructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don't realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species' preference for survival. And by carving out the path of least resistance, norms obscure alternative paths and make it seem as if there is no other way to be; as I mentioned in chapter 2, meat eating is considered a given, not a choice.

childhood, or endeared to her by family memories! A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and—kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and

Being customers in our society is dangerous. It alienates us from each other. People will prefer to spend long and lonely hours in front of the TV watching life but never really living. We must honestly ask ourselves this question: Why do we allow ourselves to become a society where neighbors or people in the same neighborhood will only find a reason to talk with each other when their dogs sniff each other by chance? Even then, the talk is just superficial and all about the weather or the pets! Why do we allow ourselves to live in a culture where many people believe that their pets are their best friends because they ‘don’t judge me’ or ‘they love me unconditionally,’ as many like to explain? If we live in a society where the only creature who can understand, love, or support us is our pet, then perhaps we have some serious problems to confront, with all respect to the dogs’ wonderful company and friendship (I have a pet also). Perhaps we need a serious change.

But as the daylight began to come through the curtains, I knew I was facing something for which I had not been prepared. It was a curious sensation, like suddenly feeling cold water round your feet, then feeling it slowly rising up your legs. It took me some time to realize that they were attacking from some part of my mind of whose existence I was unaware. I had been strong because I was fighting them out of knowledge, but I should have known that my knowledge of mind was pitifully small. I was like an astronomer who knows the solar system, and thinks he knows the universe. What the parasites were doing was to attack me from below my knowledge of myself. It is true that I had given some small thought to the matter; but I had—rightly—postponed it as a study for a more advanced period. I had reflected often enough that our human life is based completely on ‘premises’ that we take for granted. A child takes its parents and its home for granted; later, it comes to take its country and its society for granted. We need these supports to begin with. A child without parents and a regular home grows up feeling insecure. A child that has had a good home may later learn to criticize its parents, or even reject them altogether (although this is unlikely); but it only does so when it is strong enough to stand alone. All original thinkers develop by kicking away these ‘supports’ one by one. They may continue to love their parents and their country, but they love from a position of strength—a strength that began in rejection. In fact, though, human beings never really learn to stand alone. They are lazy, and prefer supports. A man may be a fearlessly original mathematician, and yet be slavishly dependent on his wife. He may be a powerful free thinker, yet derive a great deal more comfort than he would admit from the admiration of a few friends and disciples. In short, human beings never question all their supports; they question a few, and continue to take the rest for granted. Now I had been so absorbed in the adventure of entering new mental continents, rejecting my old personality and its assumptions, that I had been quite unaware that I was still leaning heavily on dozens of ordinary assumptions. For example, although I felt my identity had changed, I still had a strong feeling of identity. And our most fundamental sense of identity comes from an anchor that lies at the bottom of a very deep sea. I still looked upon myself as a member of the human race. I still looked upon myself as an inhabitant of the solar system and the universe in space and time. I took space and time for granted. I did not ask where I had been before my birth or after my death. I did not even recognize the problem of my own death; it was something I left ‘to be explored later’. What the parasites now did was to go to these deep moorings of my identity, and proceed to shake them. I cannot express it more clearly than this. They did not actually, so to speak, pull up the anchors. That was beyond their powers. But they shook the chains, so that I suddenly became aware of an insecurity on a level I had taken completely for granted. I found myself asking: Who am I? In the deepest sense. Just as a bold thinker dismisses patriotism and religion, so I dismissed all the usual things that gave me an ‘identity’: the accident of my time and place of birth, the accident of my being a human being rather than a dog or a fish, the accident of my powerful instinct to cling to life. Having thrown off all these accidental ‘trappings’, I stood naked as pure consciousness confronting the universe. But here I became aware that this so-called ‘pure consciousness’ was as arbitrary as my name. It could not confront the universe without sticking labels on it. How could it be ‘pure consciousness’ when I saw that object as a book, that one as a table? It was still my tiny human identity looking out of my eyes. And if I tried to get beyond it, everything went blank.

Just as the globus pallidus fixes various body parts in particular positions, so does the striate body initiate and monitor many stereotyped movements. Cats and dogs and horses and pigs all graze and chew, prick up their ears at a new sound, coordinate various gaits, and so on. Humans also share a wide range of stereotyped movements, similar in their features because they are designed to accomplish the same things for each individual. And further, we have noted that although both dogs and cats do many similar things—sitting, walking, drinking, jumping, grooming, and the like—they each do them in distinctly canine or feline ways. Every species has a way of doing the normal tasks of living, a manner of movement that is peculiar to it. A good mime can represent “cat” or “mouse,” or “horse,” or “ape” with a brief imitation of these animals’ manner of movement just as effectively as he could with an elaborate costume. These too are stereotypes of movement. The striate body seems to control a wide range of such movements—individual movements that have common utility, movements which continually correct our balance, movements which are the synchronized background motions’ that necessarily accompany the use of a limb, or movements which establish such standard communications as sexual arousal, docility, fear, anger, or defensiveness. As with fixed positions, in the human being both the repertoire of stereotyped movements and the stereotyped manner in which all movements are done may markedly display habitual preferences built up by compulsions, training, job requirements, and dispositions. And as with chronic fixations, there is the tendency over long periods of repetition to confuse how I do things with who I am. My most common movements, designed to be controlled by my unconscious mind so that I can freely direct my attention elsewhere, become more than stereotypes; they become straight jackets, and I find myself the prisoner of the very unconscious processes which are supposed to protect and liberate me. Re-establishing for the individual the sense of a wide array of equally possible movements is the real significance behind the work of freeing a person from limited neuromuscular patterns.

We were in the Crocodile Environmental Park at the zoo when Steve first told me the story of Acco’s capture. I just had to revisit him after hearing his story. There he was, the black ghost himself, magnificently sunning on the bank of his billabong. Standing there next to this impressive animal, I tried to wrap my mind around the idea that people had wanted him dead. His huge, intimidating teeth made him look primeval, and his osteodermal plates gleamed black in the sun--a dinosaur, living here among us. I felt so emotional, contemplating the fear-based cruelty that prompted humans to hate these animals. For his part, Acco still remembered his capture, even though it had happened nearly a decade before. Whenever Steve went into his enclosure, Acco would stalk him and strike, exploding out of the water with the intent to catch Steve unaware. Despite the conflict in Steve’s soul over whether he had done the right thing, I decided that Acco’s capture had to be. In the zoo, Acco had his own territory to patrol and a beautiful female crocodile, Connie, who loved him dearly. Left in the wild, somebody would have eventually shot him. If the choice is between a bullet and living in the Crocodile Environmental Park, I think his new territory was much more preferable. When I met Steve in 1991, he had just emerged from a solid decade in the bush, either with Bob or on his own, with just his dog Chilli, and later Sui. Those years had been like a test of fire. As a boy all Steve wanted to do was to be like his dad. At twenty-nine he’d become like Bob and then some. He had done so much more than catch crocs. In the western deserts, he and Bob helped researchers from the Queensland Museum understand the intricacies of fierce snake behavior. Steve also embarked on a behavioral study of a rare and little-understood type of arboreal lizard, the canopy goanna, scrambling up into trees in the rain forests of Cape York Peninsula in pursuit of herpetological knowledge. As much as Steve had become a natural for television, over the course of the 1980s he had become a serious naturalist as well. His hands-on experience, gleaned from years in the bush, meshed well with the more abstract knowledge of the academics. No one had ever accomplished what he had, tracking and trapping crocodiles for months at a time on his own. He would hand Bindi and Robert his knowledge of nature and the bush, just as Bob and Lyn had handed it down to him. This is what few people understood about Steve--his relationship with his family, and the tradition of passion and commitment and understanding that passed from generation to generation. Later on, that Irwin family tradition would bring Steve untold grief, when outsiders misjudged his effort to educate his children and crucified him for it.

Conversely, animals can be quite sensitive to human music. There are stories of dogs who hide under the couch for piano works by atonal composers but not for those by, say, Mozart. One music teacher told me that her dog would heave an audible sigh of relief if she stopped playing complex, fast-moving pieces by Franz Liszt and proceeded to something calmer. And there are reports of cows that produce more milk listening to Beethoven (although, if this is true, shouldn't one hear more classical music on farms?). Birds listen as carefully to sounds as any musician. They have to, because they learn from each other. Many birds are not born with the song they sing: the symphonies they offer us for free in forests and meadows are cultural. White-crowned sparrows, for example, develop their normal song only when they have been exposed early in life to the sounds of an adult of their species. Many songbirds have dialects-differences in song structure from one population to another. One theory about this is that if a female can tell from a male's song that he is a local boy, she may prefer him as a mate, as he may be genetically adapted to regional conditions. Given the variability in song from location to location it is hard to maintain that birdsong is instinctive in the usual sense. There is room for creativity and modification. Some individuals act as star performers, setting new trends in their region.

Switching costs aren’t just financial expenditures; they can also include inconveniences and risks incurred when a customer changes from one vendor to another. Consider, for example, the costs and risks when switching dog walkers. A family must trust the new walker with keys to their residence, must brief the new walker on their pet’s patterns and preferences, and run the risk that their dog may not take to this new human in its life. Switching costs can be a double-edged sword. For example, to attract customers, Baroo had to overcome these barriers. However, once it did, Baroo retained customers because they faced the high cost of switching to a competitor.

I prefer the company of my real godly dogs, as much as other people do their unreal illusory gods.

foregone, disappointing. Recently she came to the realization that she preferred the company of children and dogs to grown-up humans

If you have a dog who—at least some amount of the time—has to walk on the field leash, you should absolutely make sure that he is fitted with a harness. In general, using a harness instead of a collar is preferable, but if your dog is on a long leash, it is vital. The danger of injury that a dog is exposed to is extremely high when he reaches the end of a leash with fifteen, thirty, or more feet. The entire pressure of the jerk he receives when he hits the end of the line is distributed across the cervical spine, larynx, thyroid, and trachea. You can compare this to the impact of crashing into another car at about 35 mph. Remember: we humans put the seat belt across our chests and don’t wrap it around our necks—and for a good reason. In my opinion, wearing a harness is always more sensible than wearing a collar—in field leash training it is indispensable!

What was interesting to him was how much humans relied on their imaginations. Not just for amusement but for fundamental things as well. He preferred to allow his body to think for him.

Human beings fall for other human beings. And if they occasionally fall for an animal, they are attracted by the animal's human features. What attracts the dog lover is not the doggishness of a dog — the fact that it drools and pants and stinks and moults — but its human qualities — faithfulness, gratitude, patience in waiting for its master, if necessary reinforced with the aid of tricks such as sitting up and begging. Dogs, cats and rabbits are mirrors in which we love ourselves, and if the mirror is enough of a caricature — not ridiculous, but touching — it may even happen that we prefer the animal to the human being. The fact is that in some respects some animals are even more human than human beings themselves. No human being has such an entreating expression as a basset hound, no human being is as loyal as his dog.

The first few months after releasing the wolves, the red wolf team fielded hundreds of phone calls about red wolf sightings. Lucash regretted that some of the wolves “acted like abandoned dogs.” They loped up and down the main highways; some even chased cars and trucks. This was the naïve behavior of animals reared by human hands. Red wolf sightings were reported by motorists a total of seventy-four times in the first eleven months. The wolves, it seemed, didn’t like traveling through the briers any more than people did. Lucash later recalled that they showed a preference for using the paved and unpaved roads as travel corridors. Most worrisome, when a vehicle approached a wolf from behind, many wolves would continue to lope down the midline. When the vehicle got close, the animals would cut to the shoulder and wait for the car or truck to pass, as if they were common pedestrians. The biologists set their hopes on the wild-born wolves growing up more woods wary than their zoo-reared parents.

Still, in the many topics that suggest a realistic world, there are some that are winners and others that are losers. Among the good, the popular, and (for writers) the go-for-its: marriage, death, taxes (yes, really). Also technologies—preferably modern and vaguely threatening technologies—funerals, guns, doctors, work, schools, presidents, newspapers, kids, moms, and the media. By contrast, among the bad and unpopular, we already have sex, drugs, and rock and roll. To that add seduction, making love, the body described in any terms other than in pain or at a crime scene. (These latter two bodily experiences, readers seem to quite enjoy.) No also to cigarettes and alcohol, the gods, big emotions like passionate love and desperate grief, revolutions, wheeling and dealing, existential or philosophical sojourns, dinner parties, playing cards, very dressed up women, and dancing. (Sorry.)5 Firearms and the FBI beat fun and frivolity by a considerable percentage. The reading public prefers to see the stock market described more so than the human face. It likes a laboratory over a church, spirituality over religion, and college more than partying. And, when it comes to that one, big, perennially important question, the readers are clear in their preference for dogs and not cats.

What is peer orientation? Orientation, the drive to get one's bearings and become acquainted with one's surroundings, is a fundamental human instinct and need. Dis-orientation is one of the least bearable of all psychological experiences. Attachment and orientation are inextricably intertwined. Humans and other creatures automatically orient themselves by seeking cues from those to whom they are attached. Children, like the young of any warm-blooded species, have an innate orienting instinct: they need to get their sense of direction from somebody. Just as a magnet turns automatically toward the North Pole, so children have an inborn need to find their bearings by turning toward a source of authority, contact, and warmth. Children cannot endure the lack of such a figure in their lives: they become disoriented. They cannot endure what I call an orientation void. The parent, or any adult acting as parent substitute, is the nature-intended pole of orientation for the child, just as adults are the orienting influences in the lives of all animals that rear their young. It so happens that this orienting instinct of humans is much like the imprinting instinct of a duckling. Hatched from the egg, the duckling immediately imprints on the mother duck — he will follow her around, heeding her example and her directions until he grows into mature independence. That is how nature would prefer it, of course. In the absence of the mother duck, however, the duckling will begin to follow the nearest moving object—a human being, a dog, or even a mechanical toy. Needless to say, neither the human, the dog, nor the toy are as well suited as the mother duck to raise that duckling to successful adult duckhood. Likewise, if no parenting adult is available, the human child will orient to whomever is near. Social, economic, and cultural trends in the past five or six decades have displaced the parent from his intended position as the orienting influence on the child. The peer group has moved into this orienting void, with deplorable results.

I prefer dogs to humans. Dogs are loyal.