"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