In the case of our relationship with animals, a sense of the difficulty with reality may involve...a sense of astonishment and incomprehension that there should be beings so like us, so unlike us; so astonishingly capable of being companions of ours and so unfathomably distant.

How powerfully strange it is that they and we should share as much as we do, and also not share; that they should be capable of incomparable beauty and delicacy and terrible ferocity; that some among them should be so mind-bogglingly weird or repulsive in their forms or in      
their lives.

Cora Diamond, The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy