Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

“People are perfectly glad to accept the idea that dogs love us, so they must be able to love each other.”

“From the very dawn of time until now and well into the future... human-animal companionship is at the very core of our instincts not only for mutual survival, but mutually rewarding relationships.”

“As far as I'm concerned, I own my dogs as I own my body. My legs are with me when I take a shower, and I feel no shame. If I were to lose one, I'd grieve, and people would send sympathy cards, but it would be my condition that evoked the sympathy, not the fate of the leg. That's like losing a dog.”

“The relationships we have with dogs seem simple enough and often are taken for granted. But these relationships can be deep and mysterious, and not at all simple.”

“Dogs are a window on the natural world.”

“When I was very young, my nanny was a big Newfoundland dog... whose task was to keep me from drowning.”

“One of the best and most responsible things a scientist can do is to write for the popular press.”

“You can look at your dog and see that it's thinking and has strong feelings. And if it does, so do wolves. And if wolves do, so do elephants. People aren't the only beings that think and feel.”

“All the members of the dog family - domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, dingoes - are very aware of territory. A group must control its own territory - you can't have others taking it from you, because then you won't have enough food.”

“In my cosmology, indigenous wild deer are more important than exotic ornamental shrubs.”

“Barring some competition from whales, wolves are probably America's most popular wild animal. Wolves are also contenders for America's most unpopular wild animal, with perhaps some competition from coyotes.”

“We used to go in the woods by ourselves, and you can't help noticing the world then, especially animals. People used to know a lot about the natural world, especially in the country.”

“I always thought of deer as solitary animals that weren't very interesting. But my goodness, that was very wrong. The big eye-opener for me was that they're social. They have family groups.”

“I don't mind aging - I'm glad to be aging. I'll never die young.”

“You have to be able to love members of your own species before you can branch out and apply that to other species.”

“Every day, the humane societies execute thousands of dogs who tried all their lives to do their very best by their owners. These dogs are killed not because they are bad but because they are inconvenient. So as we need God more than he needs us, dogs need us more than we need them, and they know it.”

“Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom. But dogs feel it as peace.”

“To sit idly, not doing, merely experiencing, comes hard to a primate.”

“Besides individual things like thunder and gunshots, what dogs fear most is not belonging, being alone.”

“If you don't have manufactured items or anything we think of as 'civilization,' then you're living according to your species.”