About Animals
~ Excerpt from “The Outermost House” by Henry Beston

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…

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 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 travail of the earth."