Pinot's Mom got it! It was:

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.


from The Outermost House
by Henry Beston