Quotes and Literature Relating to Animals
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 err greatly. For
the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more
complicated 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
splendor and travail of the earth.
--- Henry Beston, 1928 (The Outermost House)
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