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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 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 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.
Henry
Beston
The Outermost House
King, one of
the Great Pyrenees dogs who
guard SkyLines sheep, and his friend
Laylah.
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