Henry Beston’s assertion from The Outermost House provides us with his distinctive perspective of human-animal relationship and his suggestion on how we humans should develop a different point of view, per se, regarding this relationship. Beston’s statement is not what you would call direct and clear, on the contrary, it requires to be broken down and analyzed to get a clear sense of what it means. This essay will endeavor in explicating three main ideas in Beston’s statement by drawing a connection with examples from J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1990) and Shaun Monson’s documentary Earthlings (2005). This essay will be emphasized on Beston’s idea of how “man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and
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Animals, in our eyes, are nothing more than something we can get something out of; we do not see the value they possess, rather the value they can provide us with. Our environment has blinded us when it comes to animals and the role they play in our everyday lives. Selfishness and greed play a significant role in seeing “the image in distortion.” We only see life in the now and proceed to do as we wish with animals, whether that be slaughtering them for food, skinning them for purses or coats, or objectifying them to be our “lab rats”; yet, we fail to see the outcome of our actions. Man in “civilization,” has come to the conclusion that he is of a higher being because he is educated. Man’s view on animals is being obstructed by his belief that he is worthy of supremacy based on his education and ability to think logically. Man sees these creatures “through the glass of his knowledge,”; therefore he does as he pleases with animals, because after all, Man knows best. Humans don’t realize the atrocity in their actions towards animals. We don’t realize that we are causing millions of animal’s tremendous amounts of pain in order for them to fulfill our needs. In the documentary Earthlings, the narrator, Phoenix, discusses how, “Some uneducated persons pretend to know that less intelligent animals don’t feel pain the same way we do… But it’s nonsense to say that the animals do not suffer because they have a lower order of intelligence.” Man’s “knowledge” leads him to believe that animals are not suffering and that they are not losing something in order for us to get what we want from
Animals, in our eyes, are nothing more than something we can get something out of; we do not see the value they possess, rather the value they can provide us with. Our environment has blinded us when it comes to animals and the role they play in our everyday lives. Selfishness and greed play a significant role in seeing “the image in distortion.” We only see life in the now and proceed to do as we wish with animals, whether that be slaughtering them for food, skinning them for purses or coats, or objectifying them to be our “lab rats”; yet, we fail to see the outcome of our actions. Man in “civilization,” has come to the conclusion that he is of a higher being because he is educated. Man’s view on animals is being obstructed by his belief that he is worthy of supremacy based on his education and ability to think logically. Man sees these creatures “through the glass of his knowledge,”; therefore he does as he pleases with animals, because after all, Man knows best. Humans don’t realize the atrocity in their actions towards animals. We don’t realize that we are causing millions of animal’s tremendous amounts of pain in order for them to fulfill our needs. In the documentary Earthlings, the narrator, Phoenix, discusses how, “Some uneducated persons pretend to know that less intelligent animals don’t feel pain the same way we do… But it’s nonsense to say that the animals do not suffer because they have a lower order of intelligence.” Man’s “knowledge” leads him to believe that animals are not suffering and that they are not losing something in order for us to get what we want from