In 1928, naturalist Henry Beston famously wrote that our fellow animals are “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,” he added. ”They are other nations .” Beston employed this turn of phrase to make a fundamental point: humankind is not the standard by which other species should be judged. That worldview would have come as a surprise to the leading thinkers from the Age of