A Small Furry Prayer Quotes

“When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“In Lovelock's view the earth was a 'super-organism,' a cybernetic feedback system that 'seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.' At the suggestion of his neighbor, author and screenwriter William Goldman, he called the system Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“It was a silly time to try to make a living out of words, but it was a silly time in general.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“animals are often fed mechanically, so their only human contact comes, and this is only in the case of breeder dogs, in the form of artificial insemination and, nine weeks later, a pair of hands snatching babies away. If Dante”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“At most puppy mills, they pack the dogs into wire cages, usually for the entirety of their lives, often in pitch-black conditions. There are waste collection trays beneath these cages, but they’re rarely emptied. Flies are a constant. With no air-conditioning in the summer and no heat in the winter, dogs freeze to death or die from heatstroke with regularity. During the hottest months, when the cage metal heats up, puppies have been known to cook on the wires. The food is poor and veterinary care infrequent. Open sores, tissue damage, blindness, deafness, ulcers, tooth decay—even rotting jaws because the tooth decay has gotten so bad—are more the rule than the exception.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“As it turns out, what makes a dog adoptable has very little to do with dogs, a great deal to do with humans.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“To get around these things, Maus lived at the back of a closet. The door was”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“There wasn’t anything wrong with these dogs. I wanted to take them all home with me. The whole damn warehouse of misery. Just strap it to my back and get the fuck out of the way.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“of the benefits of spaying and neutering, it wasn’t until the 1990s that their catchy tag line, “Less born, less killed, less cruelty,” really caught on. In the 1980s, shelters were euthanizing twenty million animals each year. But then birth rates dropped and admission rates dropped, and today, while the three to four million animals they kill annually is a slaughter, it’s also a significant improvement over the massacre that came before.”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“According to the official numbers, shelters take in somewhere between six million and eight million dogs and cats every year and euthanize about half of them. And this is an improvement. While it was back in the 1970s that the HSUS began trying to raise awareness”
― Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life