A New Vision

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures 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 fatefor having taken a form so far below ourselves. And thereby we err, greatly 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 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 splendour and the travail of the earth.

-- Henry Beston, The Outermost House