Ensuring that our home planet is healthy and life sustaining is an overwhelming priority that undercuts all other human activities. The ship must first float. Our failure to grasp these fundamental tenants of existence will be our undoing. And one thing is for certain. No calvary is going to come charging to our rescue. We are going to have to rescue ourselves or die trying. Workable solutions are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is our elementary accord with Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms has to be revitalized and re-understood.The burning question is, How?

~ Lawrence Anthony

Lawrence Anthony Animals Earth Citizen Iraq Iraq War Memoir War Wildlife Zoos

What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature--which is worth a hundred in any Zoo--must derive their knowledge of God's creatures from their appearance in prisons. ... How do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?

~ Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Dhan Gopal Mukerji Animals Nature Zoos

I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice, and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting back and forth over the grayish-yellow sandy ground, or disappearing into a bamboo thicket. The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.

~ W.g. Sebald

W.g. Sebald Animals Loss Memory Philosophy Zoos

See this abdicated beast, once kingOf them all, nibble his claws:Not anger enough left—no, nor despair—To break his teeth on the bars.

~ Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis Animal Rights Animal Welfare Captivity Circus Circus Lion Compassion Jail King Of The Jungle Lion Lions Prison Slavery The Lion King Vegan Zoo Zoos

I can give or take elephants, I never can find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.

~ Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult Animals Grey Areas Zoos

Places of confinement providing free food and medical care are called prisons.

~ John Lilly

John Lilly Animal Rights Animals Captivity Orcas Sea World Zoology Zoos

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 J. Fox

Michael J. Fox Animals Zoos

Found in trees. Sometimes also in old silent movie theaters, seaside zoos, magic shops, hat shops, time-travel shops, topiary gardents, cowboy boots, castle turrets, comet museums, dog pounds, mermaid ponds, dragon lairs, library stacks (the ones in the back), piles of leaves, piles of pancakes, the belly of a fiddle, the bell of a flower, or in the company of wild herds of typewriters. But mostly in trees.

~ Michelle Cuevas

Michelle Cuevas Bell Books Castle Turrents Comet Museums Cowboy Boots Dogs Dragon Lairs Fiddle Flower Hat Shops Leaves Library Magic Shops Mermaid Ponds Pancakes Seaside Silent Movies Theaters Time Travel Shops Topiary Gardents Trees Typewriters Zoos