For those of you that may not know this yet, Henry Beston was a kick ass naturalist, author, and animal rights advocate. Crazier still, he fought for animals back in the 20s and 30s – a time that the term “animal rights” hadn’t even formed in the general consciousness.

Unromantically, I learned about Henry Beston from a quote that was framed in the bathroom when I worked at Alaska Wildlife Alliance.  I am going to share this quote below, but I ask you enjoy it slowly, and perhaps even read it twice.  It is so full of truth, and interesting ideals that those are the instructions.  I added bold sections for my faves:

“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.”

Learn more about Henry Beston here, and also I suggest the book this excerpt was taken from: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod