We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept
of wild 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 for having taken
a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, 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 the travail of the earth. -Henry
Beston, The Outermost House, as cited by Karsten Heuer in Being
Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, p. 10 In the
“complicated artifice” of immu