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 splendor and travail of the
earth. - Henry Beston