Its life is not a version of yours.
Field Notes
It’s tempting to believe that animals feel what we would feel, want what we would want, or understand the world as we do. We project ourselves into them because it makes them easier to love. But a wild mind is not an unfinished human mind. It is something complete unto itself—shaped by millions of years of evolution into a way of experiencing reality that we will never fully enter. The greatest respect we can offer another creature isn’t pretending it is like us. It’s allowing it to remain wonderfully, irreducibly itself.