"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 far older and more complete than ours,
they
move finished and 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 life and time,
fellow
prisoners of the
splendour
and travail of the earth."
Henry Beston
