The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters

I am going to stop using the phrase "non human-animal" from now on. 

Here's a thought experiment.. well rather a test for you: 

• What did I eat for breakfast today?
• What color is the t-shirt I am wearing now? 

If you cannot answer these "simple" questions then you are stupid and dumb. 

Sounds ridiculous?  Even the above two questions you might be able to get right by random guess.

For centuries , the "system" to "test" cognitive abilities is zillion times worse than this. 

For starters we suffer from the inability to fully grasp another animal’s umwelt.

I know so many people who never even interacted with a dog or cat even for 24 hours but look down on them. 

Review of the new book The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb:

Webb, a primatologist, has no doubt about the answer. She belongs to a growing subfield of ecologists, naturalists and evolutionary biologists who argue that animals do indeed have minds, and all that goes with them, including feelings, intentions, agency and consciousness. (She urges us to avoid the term “nonhuman animal,” as it implicitly reiterates human exceptionalism, and also to use personal as opposed to impersonal pronouns when writing about animals — both suggestions I am now following, although I may be guilty of misgendering a snake as a result.)

To those of us who have animals at home — two-thirds of U.S. households, for a total of some 400 million pets, according to Webb — the fact that our cats and dogs have thoughts and feelings won’t come as a surprise. But then, why do we continue to permit the torture and slaughter of similarly intelligent and feeling animals on an industrial scale, along with the confinement and experimentation that takes place on university campuses and in the labs of pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies?

Webb argues that the culprit is a pervasive belief in human exceptionalism — specifically, the belief that humans are exceptionally intelligent. This belief, however, is wrong. As she shows, data supporting the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence has been systematically rigged in our favor.

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Why is this criticism of any importance, given how convincing I find Webb’s larger denouncement of our treatment of the animal world? To my mind, the greater ideological danger is not the belief that humans are unique, but rather our tendency to overlook the limits of possible knowledge and impose our ways of being on others.

To better cultivate the intellectual humility Webb calls for and mitigate the attitudes and errors she denounces, I would argue that we must come to better understand human experience and how it sets us apart from the natural world.