Informant38

Jeremy Rifkin�A Change of Heart About Animals: "In controlled experiments, scientists at Oxford University reported that two birds {crows} named Betty and Abel were given a choice between using two tools, one a straight wire, the other a hooked wire, to snag a piece of meat from inside a tube. Both chose the hooked wire. Abel, the more dominant male, then stole Betty's hook, leaving her with only a straight wire. Betty then used her beak to wedge the straight wire in a crack and bent it with her beak to produce a hook. She then snagged the food from inside the tube. Researchers repeated the experiment and she fashioned a hook out of the wire nine of out of 10 times.

Equally impressive is Koko, the 300-pound gorilla at the Gorilla Foundation in Northern California, who was taught sign language and has mastered more than 1,000 signs and understands several thousand English words. On human IQ tests, she scores between 70 and 95.
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Of course, when it comes to the ultimate test of what distinguishes humans from the other creatures, scientists have long believed that mourning for the dead represents the real divide. It's commonly believed that other animals have no sense of their mortality and are unable to comprehend the concept of their own death. Not necessarily so. Animals, it appears, experience grief. Elephants will often stand next to their dead kin for days, occasionally touching their bodies with their trunks."

{Well the other side would say there's maybe a nursing instinct working on the elephants, that they're responding to what may be an injured or ill member. But then isn't that pretty up the scale of 'humane' qualities? But even more to the point, I'm not so sure humans have exactly mastered the concept of mortality themselves. Research seems to indicate most people think when they die they're going somewhere else. Where that is varies from subject to subject, with little or no agreement about the specifics. And really the ultimate question here was never about how much we have in common, it was about the differences making it all right to treat other creatures like dirt. Literally like dirt. As though they were inanimate unfeeling lumps of matter. Any child will tell you this is nonsense. What we have again is goal, then justification. They want to enslave, they demote the slave to subhumanity, thereby justifying what they already did, already wanted to do.
More and more I think we're waking up to a nightmare, where who we really are is closer to psychotic monstrousness than child-like innocence. That we have this in common with all the large predators isn't much comfort. Because what's at stake is the rule of law. And the law is founded on delusion and absurdity. And hope. The hope's redeemable, we can start there. The rest will doom us.}