Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

No cat purrs unless someone is around to listen.