Animals are endlessly fascinating, and many of us are animal lovers because of it. Here are some quotes that really highlight the amazingness that they posses. (As if you needed a reminder.)

1. Animals are not property or “things” but rather living organisms, subjects of a life, who are worthy of our compassion, respect, friendship, and support.

MARC BEKOFF, Minding Animals

2. The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

MAHATMA GANDHI, attributed, The Welfare of Animals: The Silent Majority

3. If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected.

CHIEF SEATTLE OF THE SUWAMISH TRIBE, letter to President Franklin Pierce

4. Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind’s capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don’t; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us. Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests so easily brushed aside. Whenever we humans enter their world, from our farms to the local animal shelter to the African savanna, we enter as lords of the earth bearing strange powers of terror and mercy alike.

MATTHEW SCULLY, Dominion

5. Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making.

JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON & SUSAN MCCARTHY, When Elephants Weep

6. Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day. It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them.

JOHN GROGAN, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog

7. Our intuitions on animals are incoherent; the same people who condemn branding of cattle may dock the ears and tails of their dogs. The law is of no help–in the eyes of the law animals are property, either private property or community property. The Animal Welfare Act, reflecting irrational social prejudice, does not consider rats, mice, or domestic farm animals to be animals; for the purposes of the act, a dead dog used in research is an animal, a live mouse is not. And traditional moral philosophy is of no help either, since for most of its history it was virtually mute on the subject of our obligations to other creatures. More has been written on this subject, in fact, in the past ten years than in the previous three thousand.

RICHARD SHERLOCK & JOHN D. MORREY, Ethical Issues in Biotechnology

8. Animals are not humans with reduced capacities. They have their own capacities, their own spectrum of aptitudes and behaviors.

JEAN KAZEZ, Animalkind

9. Happiness is a warm puppy.

CHARLES SCHULZ, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy