"Beauty, in fact, may be the key. Do the animals come that we may still see beauty in the given shapes of living forms, perhaps even to save beauty and the animal eye that sees it first? For how does an animal recognize another animal if not by its aesthetic display? It is as an aesthetic phenomenon that an animal tells us who it is as it did Adam so he could know its name.
"The animals must have known Adam as well. We human beings too are each a living form. We too display a psychic image. We can be read, as a horse reads its rider, even as you walk toward the stable; as the lions in the circus ring read their trainer — his mood, his pace, his odor. We are each an open book to the animal eye. Especially to our household pets, who can call you on your state of soul before you have any notion of it. Household pets were called 'familiars' in the Roman world. Not only are pets part of the larger family, but they are intimately familiar observers of your unconscious presentation in everyday household life. They were the first psychoanalysts. Is that the psychological reason for the domestication of dogs and cats, of birds, pigs, cows, elephants, goats? The animals could make us aware of ourselves."