Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/519/en

Like all animals, domestic animals too have no incarnated I that would endow them, as it does the human being, with self-consciousness and thereby the power of free self-determination. The animals stand under the guidance of group souls. From these, the individual animals are "pinched-off portions" that have received imprinted into them, in a being-way, the properties of the group soul to which they belong and of which they are, in their physical-bodily nature, an image. In the wild, these soul-properties have congealed evolutively as behavior into the bodily formation, and express themselves in the physical as instinct, in the etheric-living as drive, and in the soul element as desire. In the process of becoming domestic animals, the human being once stepped to the side of the group soul of the animals — holding sway in the supersensible — and took upon himself, on earth, in a sacred human-animal relationship (the Abel stream), the responsibility and the care.