Citizen Canine Quotes

“Pets, he says, are trapped in a state from which there is no escape. “Domestication has essentially created a mentally disabled child bred to be dependent on us. My dogs will never get to the point where they’ll become wolves and live the way they’re supposed to live.” We wonder why our pets are neurotic, he says, why dogs chew themselves raw and cats shred the drapes. “It’s because they’re not supposed to be living with us. They exist in this netherworld between humans and animals.”
― David Grimm, Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs

“We may think we’ve given cats and dogs all sorts of rights, he says, but we can still buy, sell, and declaw them. And we kill millions in shelters every year. As long as they are not legal persons, our interests will always trump theirs in a court of law. They will always be Dred Scott. They will always be slaves.”
― David Grimm, Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs

“Society itself was a lonelier place. As a species, we had always been close to nature; from our days as hunter-gatherers to our millennia of living in close quarters with livestock, animals had been ubiquitous in our existence. When they disappeared from our day-to-day experience, we lost part of ourselves.”
― David Grimm, Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs