A Wiser Concept of Animals

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-05-30 08:25:00 UTC
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Several months ago, on the wall at the vet office where Mabel is a regular visitor, I noticed the following quotation featured on a print. I was surprised that I had not read it in full before then. It's lovely. (It also makes me want to start a conversation with the vets and techs there who are caring for some animals while likely eating others--makes me want to remind them that these words are true not only for dogs, cats, and other "pets" but for all animals.)

But of course we as a species generally don't think of and thus treat our fellow animals as these words suggest we ought, and for the most part, they are not just caught with us in this world, are not just our "fellow prisoners." They are caught by us. They are our prisoners. And it is because of us that so many never experience the splendor--and know only the travail.

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

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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