Who's Wiser?

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.
Copyyright, 1928, by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York

I ran across the excerpt on a rescue site, donkey rescue to be exact. No, I am not looking for another donkey, I repeat, I am not looking for another donkey :). I really do not know how that site appeared on my computer, it must have been some kind of virus attack - ha. Shhh, here comes my husband. Seriously, in a world where I had an endless supply of horse feed, acres and acres of land, and more time I would definitely have more. For now, I am quite grateful for and satisfied with my little farm/zoo as it is.