Another Concept of 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 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.

(From The Outermost House by Henry Beston)