Episode 328 – A Feather Magnified


feather
For me personally, no one has grasped the connection between human and animals more elegantly than naturalist Henry Beston. When I first encountered the passage that serves as the springboard for this podcast I was a newly-minted veterinarian. I was so deeply entrenched in the problem-oriented approach of my education, I saw animals primarily in terms of diseases and injuries. The more experience I gained, the more I realized something was missing. But I didn’t know what it was until I read the following in Beston’s The Outermost House:

“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.”

Now I realize that the same could be said about all the microorganisms that make up our world too.