Revisit this concept of animals

To the editor: There are two aspects of summer that make me cringe: both circuses and rodeos come to town to exploit animals.

Animals, both wild and domestic, deserve more respect than that. I strongly believe that both circus acts and rodeo entertainment exploit animals to the point that they are being abused. I feel that abusing animals for fun and profit is immoral and inhumane.

We need more people to endorse Henry Beston’s concept of animals, written in 1928. An excerpt follows:

“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.”

—Sally Sturgeon

Yaak