Here is a quotation I found in the waiting room of the city emergency clinic while waiting to borrow a bottle of methocarbamol for two quaking cats their owner had accidentally treated with dog Zodiac.
"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 for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we 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 the extension 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 (1888-1968)
By the time I got back to our hospital with the medicine the cats had stopped quaking. Somehow they must have absorbed enough oral Robaxin despite drooling a river.
egyptians whom we never really understood properly saw animals as gods - not mythological (that's scientific crap) but quite real. but we know so much better of course. to our own detriment.
ReplyDeleteegyptians whom we never really understood properly saw animals as gods - not mythological (that's scientific crap) but quite real. but we know so much better of course. to our own detriment.
ReplyDeletesorry the machine played a trick on me
ReplyDeleteI have a lighthearted addendum to this post. I asked a lady with a very heavy Australian accent what she feeds her puppy. She replied (at least this is what I heard): "Prisoner's Choice." You need to live in Canada to appreciate that President's Choice is a store brand, and you need to have spoken to an Australian to appreciate how their accent works. I will never go as far as to say we have imprisoned animals for our sentimental benefit, but for myself I insist on observing respect for their fundamental and primal dignity to which we will never measure up.
ReplyDelete