The Souls of Animals

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”

Here was “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul — that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain ...