Introduction: Our mountain garden never had a fence and our dogs, their friends (including humans) and uninvited guests roamed free throughout the area, often where we didn’t want them to ramble and play. We decided that current very social and playful resident golden retriever Spirit needed a fence. We found it entertaining to watch the visiting dogs reason out how to find the remaining unfenced parts of the yard. Paul & Toni mentioned to Lorelie and me that some dogs were clever (mostly female) and figured out how to get in to play with Spirit. “Watch Hannah – she can find any opening in a minute or two. If there’s an opening, she will find it.”
That comment reminded me of a quotation from the naturalist Henry Beston’s book, THE OUTERMOST HOUSE. I’d like to share that quote together with pictures of several several dogs, cats, and a horse who have shared their lives with us.Tim Olson
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 a 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, 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 splendor and travail of the earth.
T0 view previous Spiritlifter post – click here
