Barriers

Evolution is a continuum where basic structures are developed and refined. The differences man has historically tried to maintain between him and other animals repeatedly turned out to be illusions.

Then Jane Goodall discovers at the end of 1960 that chimpanzees use sticks to poke out termites. It resonated all over the world. More discoveries followed. More animals that use tools, from capuchin monkeys to fish, from otters to herons. Using tools is no longer the preserve of humans alone.

Then Alexander Weir get a Caledonian crow, Betty, to show that she can figure out how to make a hook out of a wire to fish up a small bucket of food.¹

“Humans can handle abstract concepts such as larger and smaller, number, colour and shape, animals can not”

Then Irene Pepperberg and the gray-jako parrot Alex show that a bird's brain can handle, among other things, colours, shapes, numbers and concepts such as greater than and less than.

Pepperberg also points out that emphasizing communication with humans is not really fair. Birds have their own way of thinking of which we know less.

“I mean, to emphasize the communication with humans in some ways is unfair because they have their own communication systems that work wonderfully well in the niche in which they live. And in a sense, pushing them to communicate with us is unfair. But it's one way of our actually getting - as Don Griffin, my mentor, would say - getting a window into their minds to actually determine how they process information, how they think, by giving them these tools.” ²

Then come many observations of animals that appear to understand what is going on in another animal's mind: Drongos learning to imitate the warning calls of meerkats to make them hide and then be able to steal their food; octopuses that deceive rival males by showing their neighbouring side to a female, but a female's colours to a rival ³; birds that pretend to hide food when they feel watched, especially if they themselves tend to steal from others.⁴

Empathic ability, sense of justice, ability to show care is found in at least all primates, also in dogs and birds. Humans are not alone in feeling offended by unfair treatment.

“Humans acquire knowledge by learning from each other and create culture by passing the knowledge on to future generations, animals do not”

In the mid-1950s, it was discovered that some birds have dialectal song patterns that they pass on between generations. In Japan, a local culture was discovered among macaques that involved washing sweet potatoes in water. It is now known that there are many examples of groups of animals that have their own cultural heritage, peculiarities that are passed on from generation to generation.⁵

The boundary between animal and human is a construction. Humans have certain abilities that animals lack; animals have various abilities that humans lack. We still belong to the same genus: life on earth. Man is an animal, an ape; not just distantly related to apes, but exactly an ape.

The human brain, nervous system and other organs did not arise in humans suddenly, but were inherited through an evolutionary continuum. There is no reason to regard empathy, a sense of justice, the ability to grieve, the experience of pain, joy and other similar experiences as something that suddenly arose with the rise of a specific species, Homo sapiens.

An intriguing thought is how would we treat a creature of the species Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalensis if they were alive today? Would human rights apply to them? How far down the family tree does respect for another being's life go?

“Human beings are a part of the animal kingdom, not apart from it. The separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ creates a false picture and is responsible for much suffering. It is part of the in-group/out-group mentality that leads to human oppression of the weak by the strong as in ethic, religious, political, and social conflicts.” ⁶