Freeman's animals

Over a century ago, Rilke went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he watched a pair of flamingos. A flock of other birds screeched by, and, as he describes in a poem, the great red-pink birds sauntered on, unphased, then "stretched amazed and singly march into the imaginary." This encounter -- so strange, so typical of flamingos, with their fabulous posture -- is also still typical of how we interact with animals. Even as our actions threa...