“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, from "The Outermost House"