[Wylie's Mom]

Originally Posted by Woogie Man

I'm glad you brought that up, Ann. I was going to mention it, but didn't want to seem argumentative with Brit. You worded your response beautifully, so I'll just tag along with you.

One thing that Brit's comment brought to mind was this...

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

Absolutely beautiful quote - it captures it perfectly!

Reminds me of my fave Milan Kundera quote, which is kind of on the same note (here we go, quote junkie addicts ):

"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
— Milan Kundera