Another way of looking at them...
Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 8:02 am
A beautiful quote from Henry Beston's The Outermost House:
"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 older
and wiser and more complete than ours they move finished and complete,
gifted with extentions 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 earth."
"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 older
and wiser and more complete than ours they move finished and complete,
gifted with extentions 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 earth."