Hen Chronicles: Henry Beston's "mystical concept of animals"

I’ve always loved the late naturalist Henry Beston’s oft-quoted claim, as stated in The Outermost House, that animals are "other nations." It’s applicable to all species, of course, but when it comes to our little menagerie, for some reason I associate it more with our chickens than with our dogs and cats.

In part, that’s because the three hens, living as they do by themselves in their coop at the far end of our lot, seem a bit more independent, a tad more "other," than the two dogs and four cats who share our home and are always underfoot. After all, Snow, Nellie and Hope have their own place, their own henhouse.

Chickens are, of course, domestic animals. Like us, they are vertebrates. But unlike dogs, cats and other Mammalia, chickens are birds. They can fly (though not very well). They do not give birth to live young. (Chicks are not born until they hatch.) Chickens are feathered, beaked, winged, toothless, egg-laying creatures of the Aves class that are more alien in appearance, habits and biology than the furry, four-legged companions who hog the couch, commandeer the bed and hover near the table at dinnertime.

Cats and dogs have cousins in the wild, but only the supposedly "lowly" chicken can claim to be the closest living relative of the legendary T. rex. (Really! Look it up.) That certainly earns these underappreciated latter-day dinosaurs a place of honor among the “other nations” to which Beston (1888-1968) refers in the following passage from The Outermost House, which was published in 1928.

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.