Hudson took a long view of these aggravations. “The mind in beast and bird,” he wrote, “as in man, is the main thing,” and chimangos seemed to have been gifted with a model that exceeded that of most birds he knew. He saw their opportunism as ingenuity, not mischief, and he thought Darwin and Azara had been unfair in painting them as “a sort of poor relation and hanger-on of a family already looked upon as bankrupt and disreputable.” Hudson regretted that people were so often repulsed by the animals who understand us best, from rats to city pigeons; every living thing, he believed, had a right
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