"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.
The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with 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 splendor and travail of the Earth."
~Henry Beston, The Outermost House
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Photo copyright Susan Gordon.
