We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical
concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in
civilization
surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, and sees
thereby a
feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them
for their
incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below
ourselves.
And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be
measured by man.
In a world older and more complete, gifted with extensions of the senses
we have
lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are
not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves
in the net of
time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
By Henry Beston from "The Outermost House"
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