when someone else says it better

“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 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, 1928


i've posted this before, eons ago. it's one of the paragraphs of text that i came across to have such an impact that i still revisit repeatedly after all this time. i don't discuss my particular personal beliefs with anyone unless i feel they are in accordance, but this is my blog and i love these words so. i post it not to start debate or bring about the devil's advocate in you, but because it is reflective of something in me and you are lucky that i'm in a sharing mood.