War and Peace with the Beasts Quotes

“It was St. Francis who made the first Christmas menagerie, which portrayed the animals coming to kneel before the baby Jesus. Some people think it’s the most beautiful image Christian civilization ever produced.”
― Brian Griffith, War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

“The animals that one culture likes are often hated in the next, and it seems that the animals themselves know it well.”
― Brian Griffith, War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

“Maybe it was slightly more humane to view hostile animals as possessed by evil spirits than to judge the animals as evil by nature. In that case it might seem that the beasts were only evil because the Devil made them do it, or because certain individual animals were actually evil people in disguise.”
― Brian Griffith, War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals

“Traditional ranching with fences has generally been a kind of animal monocropping. One chosen species was grown, and all others treated as pests. Although antelope, elk, or bison can also turn grass into meat, most North American ranchers have assumed that every mouthful of grass eaten by these animals is a mouthful lost to their cows. Although the wild prairies used to support both tens of millions of bison and a probably equal numbers of pronghorn antelope, the settlers eliminated these herds in roughly the same way that Brazilian ranchers burned rain forests.”
― Brian Griffith, War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals