The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.  

 -Mahatma Gandhi 

http://www.sqda.org/images/Dog_Wisdom.pps

Thoughts on dogs :

The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind.

 -Theodorus Gaza

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will there long before any of us.

 -Robert Louis Stevenson

Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.

 -Roger Caras

Dog. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship.

 -Ambrose Bierce

A dog has the soul of a philosopher.

 -Plato

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does.

 -Christopher Morley

Man is troubled by what might be called the dog wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.

 -James Thurber

He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.

 -Anonymous

The dog is a saint. He is straightforward and honest by nature. He knows by instinct when he is not wanted; lies quite still for hours when his king is hard at work. But when his king is sad and worried he creeps up and lays his head on his lap. “Don’t worry. Never mind if they all abandon you. Let us go for a walk and forget all about it!”

 -Axel Munthe

Thoughts on cats:

Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.  - Mark Twain

I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.   - Hippolyte Taine

Everything I know I learned from my cat: When you're hungry, eat. When you're tired, nap in a sunbeam. When you go to the vet's, pee on your owner. -- Gary Smith

The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names... -- T.S. Eliot

When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? -- Montaigne

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. -- Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

After scolding one's cat one looks into its face and is seized by the ugly suspicion that it understood every word. And has filed it for reference. -     ---Charlotte Gray

A dog will flatter you but you have to flatter the cat."--George Mikes

You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals."--George Mikes

Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well." Missy Dizick

Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this. Anonymous

A cat sees no good reason why it should obey another animal, even if it does stand on two legs.--Sarah Thompson

Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later.-- Mary Bly

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." -----Albert Schweitzer

I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food which they take for granted--but his or her entertainment value. --Geoffrey Household

If a dog jumps into your lap it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing it is because your lap is warmer. --A. N. Whitehead

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want. --Joseph Wood Krutch

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul. --Jean Cocteau

With the qualities of cleanliness, affection, patience, dignity, and courage that cats have, how many of us, I ask you, would be capable of becoming cats? --Fernand Mery

Thoughts on misc. animals:

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. -- Winston Churchill

Lots of people talk to animals.... Not very many listen, though.... That's the problem.  ~Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

Animals have these advantages over man:  they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.  ~Voltaire, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.  ~George Eliot

It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being.  ~Henry David Thoreau

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man.  I find the result humiliating to me.  ~Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, 1907

If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man.  All things are connected.  Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.  ~Chief Seattle of the Suwamish Tribe, letter to President Franklin Pierce

To insult someone we call him "bestial."  For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.  ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988

Thoughts on Animal rights:

I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.  ~Abraham Lincoln

No one in the world needs a mink coat but a mink.  ~Murray Banks

Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without.  ~Rue McClanahan

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering?  Because government is not.  Why not?  Animals don't vote.  ~Paul Harvey

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.  ~Albert Schweitzer

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.  He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits.  Yet he is lord of all the animals.  ~George Orwell, Animal Farm

Personally, I would not give a fig for any man's religion whose horse, cat and dog do not feel its benefits.  Life in any form is our perpetual responsibility.  ~S. Parkes Cadman

Michael W. Fox, vice-president of the Humane Society, said that, "to call an animal with whom you share your life a 'pet,' is reminiscent of men's magazines where you (a figure of speech, don't take it personally) have the Pet of the Month."  It is supposed that the continued use of the word "pet" to designate dogs or cats threatens to reduce their level of respect to the current status of twentieth century North American women.  Now that's radical.  ~The McGill Red Herring

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.  ~Author Unknown

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Drinking without being thirsty and making love at any time, Madame, are the only things that distinguish us from other animals.  ~Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro, 1784, translated

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls.  They always say because it's such a beautiful animal.  There you go.  I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.  ~Ellen DeGeneres

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal.  When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.  ~Joseph Wood Krutch

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.  ~P.G. Wodehouse

If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner?  ~As seen on a t-shirt

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.  ~Mark Twain, What Is Man, 1906

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.  ~Mark Twain

Animals can communicate quite well.  And they do.  And generally speaking, they are ignored.  ~Alice Walker

In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic.  Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased.  Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks.  So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America and sold.  In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today.  Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of wilderness.  We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics.  ~Pete Singer



Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport.  Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor.  Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given 12-gauge shotguns.  Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened.  ~R. Lerner, letter, Sierra, March-April 1991

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.  ~George Bernard Shaw

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.  ~Bradley Millar

If a ferret bites you it is nearly always your own fault.  ~Phil Drabble

The human spirit is not dead.  It lives on in secret.... It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.  ~Albert Schweitzer, Novel Peace Prize address, "The Problem of Peace in the World Today"

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections.  It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.  ~Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat.  If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.  ~Michael Fox, Sierra, November-December 1990

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity.  Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.  ~Schopenhauer

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution.  Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.  ~Thomas A. Edison

When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.  ~Ingrid Newkirk

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct.  Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit.  The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread.  But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought.  Let us work that this time may come.  ~Albert Schweitzer

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.  The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.  We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.  ~Charles Darwin

Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?  ~Jean Paul Richter

Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.  ~William Ralph Inge

Beyond domestic animals and our response to their fealty and affection, we have a peculiar charge concerning the wild animals which supply our clothes, food and adornments.  ~S. Parkes Cadman

This tendency [to cruelty] should be watched in them [children], and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage.  For the custom of tormenting and killing other animals will, by degrees, harden their hearts even towards men....  And they, who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind.  Children should from the beginning be brought up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting living beings....  And indeed, I think people from their cradles should be tender to all sensible creatures....  All the entertainment and talk of History is of nothing but fighting and killing; and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerors, who, for the most part, are but the great butchers of mankind, further mislead youth.  ~John Locke

Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is:  "Because the animals are like us."  Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is:  "Because the animals are not like us."  Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.  ~Charles R. Magel

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.  ~St. Francis of Assisi

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"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The question is not can they REASON, nor can they TALK, but can they SUFFER?"

-- Jeremy Bentham 1748 - 1832

ALONE AGAIN…

I wish someone would tell me what it is

That I’ve done wrong.

Why I have to stay chained up and

Left alone so long.

They seemed so glad to have me when

I came here as a pup.

There were so many things we’d do

While I was growing up.

They couldn’t wait to train me as a

Companion and a friend.

And told me how they’d never fear

Being left alone again.

The children said they’d feed me and

Brush me every day.

They’d play with me and walk me

If I could only stay.

But now the family “Hasn’t Time “;

They often say I shed.

They do not want me in the house

Not even to be fed.

The children never walk me.

They always say, “NOT NOW!”

I wish that I could please them.

Won’t someone tell me how?

All I had, you see, was love.

I wish they would explain

Why they said they wanted me,

Then left me on a chain?

This poem is courtesy of the SPCA of Montreal.

The SQDA thanks the SPCA of Montreal for sharing it and we also give thanks to   the anonymous author for having written it.