Photography is my hobby - nature conservation has been my accidental calling, and my career, for the past 15 years. Xeroxing an article from Outside Magazine for a couple colleagues that I'm sending on a technical assistance mission to Africa, I noticed the following passage cited from "The Outermost House," by Henry Beston:

"We patronize [the animals] for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate in 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..."

Why do I post this, when my usual subject is the species homo sapien, predominantly of the female gender? Well, to try to change your consciousness, to get you to realize that we are all (enter your favorite invisible man who magically farted out the universe)'s children, that we homo sapiens are indeed a part of the animal kingdom, NOT apart from it, and that all sentient beings have dignity and a right to life, not just Christians and Muslims. Amen, salaam, namaste!