A Prayer for Animals
Hear our humble prayer, O God, for our friends the animals, especially for
animals who are suffering; for any that are hunted or lost or deserted or
frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death.
We entreat for them all thy mercy and pity, and for those who deal with
them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hand and kindly words.
Make us, ourselves, to be true friends to animals and so to share the
blessings of the merciful.
Albert Schweltzer
Something to think about
"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
BACK to the habitrail.