I happened on this quote from naturalist author Henry Beston. It caused me to stop and think. Hope it will do the same for you.
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 for having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world
older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the
extension 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
The Outermost House
1928
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