Americans spend billions of dollars and countless hours caring for their pets. An anthropologist explains the bond between humans and animals and its importance to our evolution.

Quote contributed from a listener and attributed to Henry Beston: “Creatures of the wild: We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”