Animal Consciousness Quotes

“What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Scientists have reported that elephants grieve their dead, monkeys perceive injustice and cockatoos like to dance to the music of the Backstreet Boys.”
― Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

“Feelings are widely taken to be necessary and sufficient conditions for ethical concern. The scientific understanding of feelings outlined in this book therefore presents us with an opportunity to think a little more deeply about animal suffering. I have mentioned more than once how the advances in affective neuroscience in the late twentieth century (i.e. the realisation that what is required for sentient being is little more than a midbrain decision triangle, something that we share with all vertebrates) altered many scientists’ views about what is and is not acceptable in animal research. It seems self-evident that the same should apply to the public’s attitude towards animal welfare more generally. For example, how do we justify industrial-scale breeding and slaughter of fellow sentient beings for the purposes of eating them? When addressing this question, we must bear in mind that consciousness emerges by degrees, so that the putative sentience of a fly or a fish cannot be equated directly with that of a human being. By the same token, however, we must remember that sheep and cows and pigs (which feature so prominently on Western menus) are fellow mammals. This means they are subject to the same basic emotions that we are, such as FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF and CARE. Mammals possess a cortex, too, which means they are capable – all of them, to some degree – of consciously ‘remembering the future’ and feeling their way through its probabilities and likelihoods. As the twenty-first century unfolds, in the absence of any higher goal – if all that we are is our consciousness – what else should we do but try to minimise suffering? Now that we have a better idea of where suffering might exist, what else could we do with this knowledge? The preservation and protection of biological consciousness is decidedly not tied to the fate of our species alone.”
― Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

“The question isn’t how can you be more like us; it’s ‘how can you be more like who you really are.”
― Sandra Mendelson, The Secrets of the Animals: Inside Your Amazing Neighborhood

“Animals have unconscious experiences, i.e., they have experiences but they do not reflect on them, and have almost no memory of them. They have experiences, but have no knowledge of themselves having those experiences, and that’s precisely why they are not conscious. Animals may be likened to human sleepwalkers – they can do all sorts of complex things, but they are not conscious of performing those tasks. They are obviously experiencing the tasks as they do them, but they are equally obviously not consciously experiencing them. Many if not most people seem baffled by the concept that minds can be experiencing things without being conscious of what they are experiencing – because they think that the experience itself is the fundamental element of consciousness.”
― Harry Knox, Consciousness: The Real Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“Humans are conscious because they have knowledge – via reason, logic, language and conceptualization – while animals are not because they lack reason, logic, language and conceptualization. Here we have an astounding difference. For rationalists, animals cannot be conscious. They can be sentient (have feelings, sensations and experiences), but without consciousness. For empiricists, animals can and indeed must be conscious because they have feelings, sensations and experiences. Rationalists distinguish between sentience and consciousness. Empiricists say they are the same thing. The differences between rationalists and empiricists appear everywhere, and basically create two competing worldviews, but which are often force-fitted together.”
― Harry Knox, Consciousness: The Real Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“We are still not able to estimate the extent to which animals dance, sing, play; to give proper respect to their plasticity, enthusiasm, or wisdom.”
― Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics

“I see people for the first time, I smell them for the first time, I am close to them for the first time. I hear the heavy thumping of human hearts. The sour scent of sweat fills the cellar.

Noisy, shapless, with legs that bend, with stiffly mounted round heads, they emit mumbling, hissing sounds.”
― Andrzej Zaniewski, Rat