Parenting & Family Quote by Edwin Way Teale

Teale’s line cuts through a familiar sentimental trap: the kind of “love” that treats nature as a prop for human tenderness. By putting “love” in quotation marks, he performs a quiet but sharp accusation. The word becomes suspect, a self-justifying label slapped on behavior that’s really about comfort, control, and the pleasure of feeling kind. Petting and babying a wild animal reads as affection, but Teale frames it as a category error: it collapses an animal’s wildness into a domesticated fantasy.

The sentence pivots on respect. He isn’t arguing for colder feelings; he’s arguing for better ethics. “Normal lives” is doing heavy work here, insisting that an animal’s default state isn’t proximity to us, but autonomy from us. That idea lands with particular force coming from a 20th-century American nature writer, writing in a period when roadside zoos, circus culture, and the early pet boom blurred boundaries between wildlife and entertainment, even as modern conservation was gaining a moral vocabulary.

The subtext is a critique of anthropomorphism as a form of entitlement. Wanting closeness can be a way of taking: taking contact, taking a photo, taking a story. Teale offers a tougher standard that feels almost unfashionable in an era of viral animal videos and “rescue” content: love measured not by intensity of feeling, but by restraint. The sting is that the higher love is less visible. It looks like doing nothing, leaving no trace, and walking away satisfied that the animal never had to accommodate your emotions.