21 Quotes by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. "Answer me, you who believes that animals are only machines," he wrote. "Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?

Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making.

Dogs never lie about love.

We need cats to need us. It unnerves us that they do not. However, if they do not need us, they nonetheless seem to love us.

The curiosity of cats is, like their affection, of a purity and intensity rarely seen in humans. We would be jaded when faced with the fiftieth paper bag. Not so our cats.

Hardly any animal can look as deeply disappointed as a dog to whom one says “no.”

A lion is not a lion if it is only free to eat, to sleep and to copulate. It deserves to be free to hunt and to choose its own prey; to look for and find its own mate; to fight for and hold its own territory; and to die where it was born – in the wild. It should have the same rights as we have.

De Waal complains that anthropoid apes are so good at reading human body language as to leave people who work with them feeling transparent.34.

Us” versus “them” is not in our genes. It is something we learn.