This Gives Me Goosebumps

"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