SCHOLAR ISLAND
Animals
Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee;
and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee,
-Job 12:7
"The discovery of most of our major psychoactive drugs came from early man's observations of animals."
-Ronald K. Siegel,
"In the past, man’s obvious superiority to the animals generated a kind of contempt for them. This is changing. We’re beginning to realize the almost irreparable loss in such cruel and barbaric practices as hunting and killing innocent creatures for pleasure or mercilessly trapping and torturing harmless animals whose sole "offense" is being beautiful, thus stimulating human greed for possession of their beautiful pelts. What excuse is there now for fashionable women to wear the skins of slaughtered leopards, ermines, or fox at a time when technology can closely duplicate such materials-often at less expense than the originals?"
Joseph F. Goodavage
Magic: Science of the future
Recommended Book: Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think. by Marc D. Hauser
"And now the beasts, and they shall teach thee;
and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee."
-Job 12:7
"At first the donkeys paid me little attention, giving only occasional, disinterested glances in my direction, too preoccupied with their meal and their quiet thoughts. After several weeks of returning to the same patch, some eventually ventured up the slope. With upright, inquiring ears and curious, petitioning eyes, they'd give me melancholy stares. They seemed so utterly calm and gentle. Under their frizzy fronts and impenetrable gaze. behind their dark, nonjudgmental eyes, I sensed deep philosophical thoughts as well as a tacit fraternity-the fraternity of a chance meeting on a summer's afternoon, the vulnerability of two finite beings in illicit rendezvous."
-Andy Merrifield
The Wisdom of Donkeys
"Scientifically speaking, the single greatest lesson Alex taught me, taught all of us, is that animal minds are great deal more like human minds than the vast majority of behavioral scientists believed=-or, more importantly, were even prepared to concede might be remotely possible. Now, I am not saying that animals are miniature humans with somewhat lower-octane mental powers, although when Alex strutted around the lab and gave orders to all and sundry, he gave the appearance of being a feathery Napoleon. Yet animals are far more than the mindless automatons that mainstream science held them to be for so long. Alex taught us how little we know about animal minds and how much more there is to discover. This insight has profound implications, philosophically, sociologically, and practically. it affects our view of the species Homo Sapiens and its place in nature."
-Irene M. Pepperberg
Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of animal Intelligence-and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process
"All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."
-Samuel Butler
"I care not for a man's religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it."
-Abraham Lincoln
"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 will's"
-Voltaire (1694-1778)
"We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc. of which man boasts may be found in an incipient, and , even sometimes in a well-developed condition in the lower animals."
Charles Darwin
"Verily God hath one hundred loving kindnesses; one of which He hath sent down amongst man, quadrupeds and every moving thing upon the face of the earth: by it they are kind to each other, and forgive one another; and by it the animals of the wilds are kind to their young; and God hath reserved ninety-nine loving kindnesses, by which life will be gracious to His creatures on the last day."
Muhammad (Sayings of Muhammad)
"It may have begun with Noah, but, wherever it started, the whole idea of rearranging the earth's wild creatures still seems irresistible, Man, the supreme meddler, has never been quite satisfied with the world as he found it, and as he has dabbled in rearranging it to his own design, he has frequently created surprising and frightening situations for himself.....Release of wildlife into territory foreign to it involves, not a calculated risk, but a risk too great to calculate."
-George Laycock, The Alien Animals,
"Cows everywhere. There are over one billion cows alive today. They are grazing on six continents. a quarter of the earth's landmass is used as pasture for cattle and other livestock."
Jeremy Rifkin
Beyond Beef
"Once introduced to the New World, Isabella's pigs became one of the staples of Spanish armies and colonists. Able to forage for themselves and remarkably fertile, the pigs provided a valuable source of easily transported and self-perpetuating protein. for the conquistador on the move, the pigs offered many advantages, according to historian Charles Hudson: "Pigs are the most efficient food producers that can be herded.....A pig's carcass yields 65 percent to 80 percent dressed meat.....A four-ounce serving of pork yields 402 calories....Pigs are unusually fecund. A female as young as nine months may become pregnant, and she can give birth to as many as twelve in a litter....Thus a herd of [pigs can increase prodigiously within a few years."
-Kenneth C. Davis
America's Hidden History
"Perhaps the greatest unintended consequence of this mobile mess hall may have been the waves of disease that are credited with wiping out so much of the native American populace the Spanish encountered. In 1491, Charles C. Mann fingers the pigs, the "ambulatory meat locker," as the possible culprit behind the deadly epidemics that swept the New World's original inhabitants. "Swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass disease to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people.....Only a few....pigs would have to wander off to contaminate the forest."
-Kenneth C. Davis
America's Hidden History
I heard a broadcast about wolves, with recordings of their howls. What a language! The most heartrending I know, and I shall never forget it. From now on in moments of excessive solitude, I need merely recall those sounds to have the sense of belonging to a community."
F.M. Coran
The Trouble with Being BornSee article: "Apes, Wolves, and the Trek to Humanity" by Wolfgang M. Schleidt, Discovering Archaelogy, Mar/April 1999
"Pilgrims from England landed on the coast of present-day Massachusetts in 1620 to carve a settlement from a vast and forbidding wilderness. Living cheek by jowl with North America's wolves, settlers quickly came to fear and loathe these formidable predators, which competed for deer and preyed on livestock. Spurred on by tales of werewolves terrorizing the towns and villages of Europe, the Pilgrims and those who came after them set about wiping wolves from the face of the continent. In 1630, their young colony became the first to offer a bounty for every wolf killed. Nearly four centuries later, conservationists are trying to rescue red and eastern wolves from oblivion."
Article "Fall and Rise of the big bad wolf" www.newscientist.com
"Of animal technology we know very little. For millennia the use of tools was considered exclusively human: a unique attribute of homo faber. Now we begin to see that this is not so. Animals do use tools."
Elisabeth Borgese
The Language Barrier: Beasts and Men
The bowerbirds, a family of passerine birds at home in the rain forests of Australia and New Guinea, have evolved something that looks remarkably like art. They build display grounds or ~bowers~-~ laid cut in the same direction like Islamic masques-and decorate them with shells, colored glass, shining objects. Three families of these birds actually paint the walls of their bowers with fruit pulp, wet powdered charcoal, or a paste of chewed-up grass mixed with saliva. One species, the satan bowerbird, is known to make a tool-a wad of Mrk-with which to apply the paint. Others have the hobby of gardening. Members of one species decorate their nine-foot-high bowers with living orchids. Others build huts before which plant live meadows of moss and on these, most painstakingly, they arrange colored fruits, flowers, fungi, and other objects....
Elizabeth Mann Borgese - The Language Barrier: Beasts and Man
Book: "Birder: Tales of a Tribe" by Mark cocker
Approximately one third of the world's 4,000-5,000 livestock breeds are at risk and may become extinct, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). New, highly specialized breeds are believed to be the reason why local breeds are dying out-at a projected average rate of three breeds lost every two weeks. Although the modern breeds can be very productive, they have narrowed genetic diversity, which is needed to breed animals with characteristics that will enable them to thrive in different conditions The FAO reports that in 80 percent of the world's rural areas, locally adapted breeds are superior to modern livestock
(Financial Times, London. animals killed on highway=350,000,000)
Hear our humble prayer. 0 God, for our friends the animals, especially for animals who are suffering; for any that are hunted or lost, or deserted or frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death. We entreat for them all thy mercy and pity and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words. Make us, ourselves, to be true friends to animals and so to share the blessings of the merciful,'1
Albert Schweitzer
"Are there rewards for our doing good to quadrupeds, and giving them water to drink?" Muhammad said, "Verily there are heavenly rewards for any act of kindness to a live animal."
Muhammed
The Sayings of Muhammed
(In the Koran, animal life stands on the same footing as human life in the sight of God. "There is no beast on earth," says the Kuran, "nor bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a people like unto you (mankind)-and to the Lord shall they return.)
Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man. But wakan-Tanka does not intend that they should do so directly. Man must do the greater part in securing an understanding.
Brave Buffalo, (Standing Rock Reservation)
"If we are honest with ourselves1 all of us will admit to yearning for a connection with animals."
Allen N. Schoen & Pam Proctor
Love, Miracles and Animal Healing
"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."
-Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Love animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them. don't deprive them of their happiness; and don’t work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it. and leave the traces of your foulness after you-alas, it is true of almost every one of use.
Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
A brown thrasher can eat 6,180 insects a day.
A Swallow will devour 1,000 leafhoppers in 12 hours. A house wren will feed 500 spiders and caterpillars to its young during one summer afternoon. A pair of flickers considers 5,000 ants a mere snack. A Baltimore Oriole eats 17 caterpillars a minute.
In the last four hundred years, rat predation has eradicated more species of land and freshwater birds-mostly on oceanic islands-than all other causes combined.
"Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals don’t love them But those who respect their natures and wish to let normal lives, love them more.
Edwin Way Teale and Loren Eisley
The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eisley
"The wolf and man have ever been at war because at heart are alike; they love and are rejected. Between them they molded the dog, who is the orphan offspring of both and accordingly."
Loren Eisley
"There is no faith which has never yet been broken, except that of a truly faithful dog."
Konrad Lorenz
"In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn’t merely try to train him to be semi human. The point of it is to open yourself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog."
Edward Hoagland
"We are alone,
absolutely alone on
this chance planet:
and, amid all the forms of life that surround
us, not one, excepting
the dog, has made
an alliance with us."Maurice Maerterlinck
"Dog does not eat dog."
Juvenal
Dog. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship."
Ambrose Bierce
"Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.
Henry Beston &Willian Ralph Inge
"And here I say to parents, and especially wealthy parents. Don't give your son money. As far as you can afford it, give him horses. No one ever came to grief? except honorable grief? through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them: unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die."
Winston Churchill
My Early Life
"I will not change my horse with any that treads.
He bounds from the earth;
When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk.
He trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it.
The bases horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.
He's of the color of the nutmeg and of the heart of the ginger.
He is pure air and fire, and the dull elements
Of earth and water never appear in him,
But only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him....
His neigh is like the bidding of a monarch,
And his countenance enforces homage."
William Shakespeare, King Henry V
Global livestock gazing and feed production use "30 percent of the land surface of the planet." Livestock-which consume more food than they yield-also compete directly with humans for water. And the drive to expand grazing land destroys more biologically sensitive terrain, rain forests especially, than anything else.
But what is even more striking, and alarming is that livestock are responsible for about 18 percent of the global warming effect, more than transportation's contribution. The culprits are methane-the natural result of bovine digestion-and the nitrogen emitted by manure. Deforestation of grazing land adds to the effect.
"Livestock's Long Shadow" by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
"Dogs and cats, though still dominant in the pet trade, are passé in many quarters. The lucrative growth in the pet industry now centers on exotic reptiles, aquarium fish, and furry "pocket pets"-small, reputedly low-maintenance companions for today's fast-paced lifestyles and cramped apartment and condominium living. A quick search of the Internet shows that trendy companions range in price from $5 for hamsters to $5,000 for capuchin monkeys. The offerings include sugar gliders, bush babies, capuchins, marmoset monkeys, chinchillas in eight colors, degus ("the poor man's chinchilla") chipmunks, coatimundis, African dormice, duprasi (fat-tailed gerbils), fennec foxes, ferrets, three varieties of hamster in eighteen coat colors, African pygmy hedgehogs, kinkajous, possums, pygmy mice, spiny mice, jerboas, prairie dogs, and southern flying squirrels. By one estimate, there were 14 million of these animals in U.S. homes in the mid-1990s. The increasing popularity of small exotic mammals prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1998 to begin licensing retailers as well as breeders."
-Yvonne Baskin
A Plague of Rats and Rubber Vines: The Growing Threat of Species Invasions
"Man and the rat will always be pitted against each other as implacable enemies. And the rat's most potent weapons against mankind have been its perpetual maintenance of the infectious agents of plague and of typhus fever."
-Hans Zinsser
Rats, Lice and History
"The conquistador Hernando de Soto introduced hogs to North America in 1539: now more than 4 million run wild in at least 39 states, from California to New Jersey. The fiercely intelligent animals are prodigious breeders (a pig population can triple in a year) and will eat everything from acorns and blackberries to sea-turtle eggs and deer fawns. They also spread brucellosis and pseudorabies; destroy cropland, gardens, and golf courses; and foul rivers and streams with their muddy wallows. All told, Sus scrofa causes an estimated $800 million in property damage each year.
No state is better acquainted with the porcine menace than Texas, where more than 2 million rampaging hogs cost landowners some $52 million in damages annually, and where lawmakers recently debated a bill that would have allowed private hunters to gun down pigs from the air.
"There are two types of landowners in Texas-those who have hogs, and those that are about to have hogs," says Billy Higginbotham, a wildlife specialist at the Texas AgriLife Extension Service at Texas A& M. "We're not going to eradicate them with current technology"
Houston's bloody war on wild boars by Malcolm Gay Atlantic Monthly November 2009
More than 1,48 billion wild animals were brought into the U.S. between 2000 and 2006, according to a multi-institution investigation, most were not labeled with a species identification
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Book: "The Specter of Speciesism: Buddhist and Christian Views of Animals" by Paul Waldau
Book: "The Book of Animal Ignorance"
Book: "AnimalKind: What we Owe to Animals" by Jean Kazez (Philosophy teacher at Southern Methodist University)
Book: "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World" by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter
Book: "The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility In A Chaotic World" by Andy Merrifield
Book: "Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America" by Virginia DeJohn Anerson
Book: "Sheep: The Remarkable Story of the Humble Animal That Built the Modern World." by Alan Butler
Book: "Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence-and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process" by Irene M. Pepperberg
Book: "Beef And Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation" by Ben Rogers
Book: "RAT; How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed its Way to the Top" by Jerry Langton
Book: "Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism-for Animals" by Matthew Scully
Book: "Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, And the Call to Mercy." by Matthew Scully
Book: "Animals In Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior" by Temple Grandin & Catherine Johnson
Book: The Tower Menagerie: Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts" by Daniel Hahn
Book: "Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children" by Michael Newton
Book: "The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals" by Jeffrey Moussaleff Masson
Book: "The Pawprints of History: Dogs and the Course of Human Events" by Stanley Coren
Book: "Kindred Spirits: How the Remarkable Bond between Humans and Animals Can change the Way we Live" by Allen M. Schoen
Book: "Journeys with the IceBear" by Kennan Ward
Book: "Encyclopedia of Animals" Ed by Harold G. Cogger
Book: "Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide to the World's Wildlife" Ed. by David Burnie
Book: "Animal Encyclopedia" by Jonathan Elphick et. al.
Book: "The Hidden Powers of Animals" by Karl P.N. Shuker
Book: "Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600-`1950" by Peter Boomgaard
Book: "Wild Health" by Cindy Engel
Book: "The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs" by Lyall Watson
Book: "Dogs At War: True Stories of Canine Courage Under Fire" by Blythe Hamer'
Book: "The Voice of the Coyote" by J. Frank Dobie
Book: "Creatures Of Accident: The Rise of the Animal Kingdom
Book:" Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in our Midst" by Catherine Reid
Book: "Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart" by Marc Bekoff
Book: "Elephants: A Cultural and Natural History" by Karl Groning
Book: "Animals & Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness." by Giorgio Samorini
Book: "Intoxication" by Dr. Siegel
Book: "Animal: Smithsonian Institution" Ed. by D. Burnie & D.E. Wilson
Book: "Kinship with All Life" by J.A. Boone
Book: "On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals" by Stephen H. Webb
Book: "Dog's Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship" by Mark Derr
Book: "Wolves: Life in the Pack" by Chris Whitt
Book: "The World of the Wolf" by Candace Savage
Book: Vicious: Wolves and Men in America" by Jon T. Coleman
Book: "Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee" by Hattie Ellis
Book: "Winged Wonders; A Celebration of Birds in Human History" by Peter Watkins & Jonathan Stockland
Book: "A Brand-New Bird: How Two Amateur Scientists Created the First Genetically Engineered Animal" by Tim Birkhead
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