Ted Kerasote > Quotes

“For us hunting wasn’t a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild unprocessed food free from pesticides and hormones and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel. In addition, hunting provided us with an ever scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness, direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us. Lives that even vegans indirectly take as the growing and harvesting of organic produce kills deer, birds, snakes, rodents, and insects. We lived close to the animals we ate. We knew their habits and that knowledge deepened our thanks to them and the land that made them.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“How many abused souls—dogs and humans alike—have remained in an unloving place because staying was far less terrifying than leaving?”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“And so what do dogs want? They want what they want when they want it. Just like us.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“The Snow Leopard’s Tale is a mystical pilgrimage into that wild country where animal passion and the human heart begin to walk the very same trail. Whether one has been in the business of adventuring, as Thomas McIntyre has, or has enjoyed such adventures from the safety of one’s armchair, The Snow Leopard’s Tale is a haunting, beautifully written, and thought-provoking tale, as all great parables are. ”
― Ted Kerasote

“Nobody needs to control or be controlled by cues and signals all the time; living creatures are not a bunch of machines.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.”
― Ted Kerasote, Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs

“Yet one powerful way of cleaning up a small bay of the chemical ocean is within our reach. We can vote with our purchases. It is the one thing to which industry pays attention. How many polyester dog toys, laced with antimony, would manufacturers continue to produce if none of us bought them? How many Frisbees, footballs, and retriever dummies full of phthalates would they make, if these toys sat on the shelves? How many fire-retardant dog beds and how many kibble bags lined with PFCs would any manufacturer ship, if they remained unbought? It is a powerful way to change silence into action. Our dogs, after all, have no say.”
― Ted Kerasote, Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs

“Then, having had a good cry about my being gone, he’d collect himself and get on with his life, proceeding south into the village, with head and tail erect.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“Ralph was tall, affable, and handsome—Christopher Reeve as Superman—and Scout was frumpy, opinionated, and a little overweight, the canine version of Gertrude Stein.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“At a certain point you need to acknowledge that your partner knows more about what makes him or her happy than you do. Stepping back, you let that partner be.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“humans began to erect fences to protect their property from the wild. Some of these fences were actual ones, like corrals, and some were symbolic, like the Jewish faith’s sanctioning human dominion over all of Earth’s creatures, and, later, the Christian faith’s decreeing that humans had souls but animals didn’t.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“Without any reinforcement—except that of seeing his peers hunt—he had learned every detail of flushing and retrieving and hadn’t been spooked in the least by the report of the gun.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“never paralyzed by the need to judge and to compare. They don’t dwell on the fact that today’s walk isn’t as nice as yesterday’s, or this forest isn’t as interesting as the one they were in last week.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“as your dog becomes more self-actualized, he may hold up the mirror for you, and the face you see can be humbling.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“For us, hunting wasn’t a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild, unprocessed food, free from pesticides and hormones, and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel. In addition, hunting provided us with an ever-scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness—direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us, lives that even vegans indirectly take as the growing and harvesting of organic produce kills deer, birds, snakes, rodents, and insects.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“They love being wherever they are. The reason, and it is a great lesson, is no doubt that they are perfectly content to be who they are, without torturing themselves with alternatives: They love being dogs.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“whereas the first llama had previously become annoyed, stomping his feet, he now became infuriated. He turned and spit into the second llama’s face.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“hallmarks of the syndrome—a powerful individual’s coercing a captive into submission, and even the demonstration of affection—have now been identified in cases of dependent children, battered wives, prostitutes, prisoners of war, and victims of hijackings.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“when she was three to five weeks old. It is during this time that puppies learn to play together and begin to understand the difference between biting for real and biting softly during sparring matches.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“Unlike me, he didn’t then segue into an endless series of whys—why, if we remain so close, if we can converse so intimately, can you not be with me?”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin,”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“[A] puppy does not automatically love you because you feed it.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“endorses massage therapy for dogs, as well as the use of “nutraceuticals”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“Some dogs, thankfully, can break us of our patronizing habits—as Merle did for me.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“These techniques should be regarded as surgical and/or medical procedures under state veterinary practice acts.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“(acupuncture) and acutherapy are considered an integral part of veterinary medicine.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“Dogs have no favorite walks, only people do, writes Masson, adding that dogs love all walks.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“Perhaps Ms. W., like thousands of people, had gotten a big dog on purpose—a dog of a breed with a genetic predisposition toward aggressive behavior—in the hope that it would protect her.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“I knew for certain that being accorded a biography isn’t dependent on one’s species or one’s fame.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

“It’s very important for an athletic dog like you to have a massage each day.”
― Ted Kerasote, Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog