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Are Humans Inherently Superior to Other Animals? The Question at the Root of Animal Advocacy · The Animal Advocate

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This episode is a little bit different. It's not about a law
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or an issue in animal sheltering. It's the foundation for
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all our thinking about animals and how we treat them. It's about
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philosophy and an ethical approach to animals—all
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of them—and whether the way we treat animals is consistent with
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our beliefs about them. And especially whether there's
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anything that reliably separates humans from other animals.
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So consider this one of those shorter, more conversational weeks I mentioned
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in my year-end episode about winemaking. Though I'll be honest,
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it got a little longer than I planned. Some thoughts just
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won't stay small.
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Welcome to The Animal Advocate, where we arm animal lovers
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with the information and inspiration you need to become
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effective advocates. I'm your host, Penny Ellison, and
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I've taught animal law and advocacy at the University of Pennsylvania since
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2006. If you've ever thought, "Someone
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should do something about that," I'm here to guide you on your
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journey to being that someone. You can find us on the
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web at animaladvocacyacademy.com.
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And that's where you'll find show notes and resources, and you can send
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us your comments on episodes and ideas for topics you'd like to hear
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on future shows. So, onto today's topic.
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What makes us different from other animals? It's one of
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the oldest questions humans have asked, and we've been getting the answer
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wrong for a very long time, because our understanding
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of animals keeps changing. We do things
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to animals that we would never do to humans:
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confine them in small quarters for their whole lives,
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use them for experiments, kill them. And
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most people, most of the time, don't lose sleep over it.
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Why? Because we've decided we're in a different
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category. Not just different—better.
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That idea has a long history. In
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1649, René Descartes watched a dog
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being cut open alive and concluded that the screaming didn't mean
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anything. Because he had a theory. His theory
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was that animals are basically very sophisticated machines.
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They respond to stimuli. They make sounds,
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but there's nobody home. No soul. No
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inner experience. So the screaming and the
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grimacing—that's just gears like clockwork,
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not suffering. He called it dualism:
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mind and body are separate. Humans have
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minds; animals just have bodies.
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And that distinction, that one idea, gave centuries of
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scientists, farmers, and lawmakers a clear
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conscience. We've moved on from Descartes.
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Nobody serious is arguing animals can't feel pain anymore.
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We have animal cruelty laws. We use words like "sentience,"
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meaning the capacity to feel, to experience pleasure and pain,
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to have an inner life. And most scientists now
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accept that many animals have it—almost all of them.
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We've come a long way. And yet, we're still
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drawing that line. We're still looking for that thing that
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makes us categorically different. And not just different,
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different in a way that matters morally.
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I listened to a podcast recently by Gretchen Rubin. She
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hosts the wildly popular Happier podcast. She's a
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lawyer, a former Supreme Court clerk, and someone I really enjoy.
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And she made a list of all these things that are unique to
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humans. It's an interesting list, and I don't think she's
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wrong that There are some real distinctions. But it
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got me thinking because we've had this list before.
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One of the things I remember being taught, and I think a lot of us
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were taught this, was that tool use was uniquely
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human. We were the only species that figured out how
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to make and use tools. That was a
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differentiator. That was what set us apart.
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Then we watched chimpanzees strip leaves off twigs to
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fish termites out of mounds. Then we watched
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crows bend wire into hooks to retrieve food from
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tubes. Then we watched octopuses carry
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coconut shells across the ocean floor to use as
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portable shelter. So tool use had to
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come off the list. Language was
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also on that list of things that set humans apart. But
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then we did more research, and language had to come off the list
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too. Kanzi was a bonobo at a language
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research center in Des Moines, Iowa. Researchers gave him
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a keyboard of symbols. He didn't just learn them.
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When they introduced kale, a food he had no symbol for,
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he described it as "slow lettuce" because it took him a while to
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chew it. He'd never seen that combination of words.
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He invented it. And whale songs. Humpback
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whales compose songs that change over time, that spread
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across ocean basins as other whales learn and
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adopt them. Whether that constitutes language
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in the way we mean it is still debated, but it's not nothing.
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So language also came off the list of what makes us
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unique. The list keeps getting
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shorter, and it will keep getting shorter. Our
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understanding of animal cognition, communication, and
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emotion is expanding faster than at any point in our
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history. Every few years, or more frequently,
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something we were certain was unique to humans turns out not
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to be. And that can make people uncomfortable.
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Because if animals use tools and communicate in ways we once thought
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were ours alone, what else were we wrong about?
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So Gretchen Rubin's current list of what makes us uniquely human
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includes some things you'd expect and some that are genuinely
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surprising. Humans are apparently the only animals to
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contemplate our own death abstractly, to feel
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complex shame, to ask open-ended
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questions to gain information, to shed
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emotional tears, to cook our food,
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to use symbols that stand for abstract concepts,
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to combine words in new ways to express unlimited new
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ideas, to contemplate the distant past and
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future, to blush from embarrassment, to
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do what she calls freighted walking, walking long distances while carrying
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things, and this one I did not see coming, to have
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chins. We are the only animals with chins.
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Researchers still aren't entirely sure why. So
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she's not making a moral argument. She's just observing differences,
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and that's okay. What makes us different from other species is a
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genuinely interesting question. But what we do with that
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information is where it gets a lot more interesting.
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We're not just cataloging differences the way a biologist might note
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that dolphins use sonar and we don't.
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We're building a hierarchy, and then
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we're using that hierarchy to justify treating other species
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in ways we would never treat our own. The
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list isn't just descriptive. It's what we use to
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justify treating them differently and often not giving
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their interests any real weight.
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And there's a problem baked into the whole enterprise that we almost never
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talk about: we are the ones writing
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the test. Every item on that list measures
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other species against a human standard. We're
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not asking what bonobos can do that we can't. Or what
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elephants experience that we're incapable of. We're asking
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how close other animals come to being us.
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That framing makes human superiority the conclusion before
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the analysis even starts. So let's
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walk through a few items on Gretchen's list, not to dismiss them,
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but to examine how solid those differences are.
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I'll start with a few that I think probably hold up.
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Chins. Sure, I'll give us chins. Freighted walking
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is genuinely linked to human anatomy and our evolutionary history.
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The precision gripping thumb is real. So those abilities
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may very well be uniquely human. But now let's
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look at some of the others. Contemplate the distant past
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and future. Elephants appear to grieve
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based on memory of specific individuals.
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They return to their bones, not just any bones, their
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family members' bones. They go quiet. They
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stand there. They touch the bones with their trunks,
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come back years later. That's not
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instinct responding to a present stimulus. That's
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memory of a specific individual carried forward in
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time after they're gone. If that's not contemplating
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the past, I'm not sure what we'd call it.
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Complex shame. Well, honestly, what does that even
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mean? We see what we interpret as shame often with our
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dogs. And do we know enough about what's happening inside an
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animal when it tucks its tail and averts its eyes to say with
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confidence that whatever they're feeling isn't complex enough to
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qualify? What about contemplate
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their own death abstractly? Crows
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gather silently around their dead. They go quiet.
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They mob the area. They appear to investigate.
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Elephants return to the remains of their dead in ways that go well
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beyond practical behavior. Whether any of that
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constitutes abstract contemplation of mortality, we don't
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know. And that's the honest answer for a lot of the things on this
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list. And then there's something that's not even on
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Gretchen's list. Researchers found that
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rats would refuse to press a lever for food if pressing
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it meant another rat received an electric shock.
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They went hungry rather than cause pain to another
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animal. We have a word for that response in humans.
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We call it empathy. The rats weren't just
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feeling something, they were responding to what another
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individual was feeling. That's a capacity we
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didn't think to put on the list because we probably just assumed it wasn't there.
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And notice what's happening: contemplate death,
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but only if you do so abstractly; shame counts, but
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only if it's complex; Every time an animal gets
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close to proving that it has one of these special qualities, we
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move the goalposts a little further out. But we put those
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goalposts there. We designed a test that measures
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everything against a human standard, and then we're surprised when
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humans come out on top. What if a bird wrote the
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test? "I can fly and you can't. Ergo, birds
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are clearly superior." We'd call that absurd, but it's the
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same logic. I'm not asking
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anyone to have this all figured out. I'm not sure I do either. In fact,
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I'm sure I don't. My opinions have always kept evolving.
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The question of whether different means inferior
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and gives us a license to treat other living beings as resources,
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to breed them and keep them confined, —to use them to test
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drugs and products—to cause them suffering? That's
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not a biological question. It's a moral one.
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And it's why I changed the name of my class from Animal Law to
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Animal Law and Ethics. You can't figure out what the law
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should be without thinking about this kind of ethical question.
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The law is supposed to reflect how we resolve
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moral questions like this. The list of
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differences between humans and other animals gets shorter all the time,
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and it will keep shrinking. It's time we started
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examining our beliefs around this kind of hierarchical thinking
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and ensure that our actions and our laws are
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consistent with what we believe. Other
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species have their own right to be on this planet, and yes,
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to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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That's it for today. The Animal Advocate is brought to you by the
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Animal Advocacy Academy. If today's episode got you
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thinking about what you can do to change things for animals,
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I want to make sure you know about the Four C's of Legislative Advocacy
13:35
for Animals. It's a free audio series I put together
13:39
that gives you a real framework for making legislation happen.
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You can find it at
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animaladvocacyacademy.com/fourcs.
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That's four Cs, F-O-U-R-C-S.
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And you can find all our episodes and show notes at
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Questions on today's topic or anything else? Just email us
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Remember, compassion is great, but
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compassionate action is infinitely better.
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Until next week, live with compassion.