Perhaps one central reason for loving dogs is that they take us away from this obsession with ourselves. When our thoughts start to go in circles, and we seem unable to break away, wondering what horrible event the future holds for us, the dog opens a window into the delight of the moment.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonThen in a great crash they threw themselves to the floor, ears flopped down, the whites of their eyes showing, looking the way only a dog can look who is totally disappointed. Indeed, they were the very pictures of disappointment.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonTags: dogs disappointment
We might miss the sign or we may be unable to read the expression, but it is almost a contradiction in terms to say that a dog feels something but does not show it. What a dog feels, a dog shows, and, conversely, what a dog shows, a dog actually does feel.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonWe 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.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonTags: cats humans jeffery masson
(about cats) They also resist our calls to come, to move, to obey, to present themselves, to do all the things that dogs do so easily. This drives some people crazy. Cats do not even care what drives us crazy!
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonTags: cats dogs humans jeffery masson
It is rarely possible, when a human being is in deep need, to look upon somebody who offers help as merely another flawed human being with whom one is going to engage in a protracted conversation. A kind of wild idealization sets in, and we imagine the person in whom we confide to possess ineffable and valuable traits beyond those attainable by ordinary mortals. We ascribe value, and project qualities onto this person that almost never correspond with reality. It is a little bit like falling in love - powerful emotions are called forth. It takes a strong person not to exploit the ensuing power imbalance.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonWe are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonTags: animals food meat ignorance industry eggs dairy factory-farming
What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonTags: intelligence animals ignorance
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.
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonVoltaire 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?
Jeffrey Moussaieff MassonTags: questioning-mind
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