Beating the dead horse of animals vs humans

Hey, in my crowd I wouldn't bet on it. I've always hung around with people who love language and play games with it. The other kind don't find me to be very good company.

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Are you sure? That's a rather arbitrary definition. For starters, if you're excluding insects (six-legged arthropods) I'm sure you also exclude all the other arthropods: arachnids (eight legs), myriapods (centipedes and millipedes) and crustaceans (no standard number of legs but they're the aquatic ones). And why stop there? Surely you reject the mollusks, earthworms, jellyfish... all the way down to the amoebae; all of which are, properly, animals. I suspect what you meant to say was that only vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and bony fish) count as "true animals." People who use that paradigm probably include the cartilaginous fish (sharks, eels, rays, etc.) because it's unlikely that those people even know enough basic biology to realize that those animals are not real fish at all, but members of a separate phylum.

Back in the 1950s you'd occasionally hear an old back-country paradigm, in which "animal" meant only mammals. I used to have a kids' picture card game called "Animal, Bird or Fish?"

Many animals have strong social instincts. Some are pack-social like most primates including humans, bonding strongly to a small circle of pack-mates, and some are herd-social, living in moderate harmony and cooperation with large number of anonymous herd-mates (or flock or whatever it's called for the particular species).

The pack-social species have many behaviors that are precursors to ours such as loyalty, self-sacrifice, rivalry, love and playfulness. The reason dogs were the first animal to domesticate themselves is that their attitudes and habits are similar enough to ours to make a compatible multi-species pack. Anyone who's lived with any species of parrot (arguably most are flock-social but their high IQ gives them many pack-social traits) knows how easily they fit into a human family while at the same time teaching us new ways of seeing the world.

That's because they don't have our massive forebrain and have not invented the technology of language, and because they don't have opposable thumbs and have not invented spatulas and frying pans. But despite those handicaps the cetaceans have invented complex communication systems that we can't even understand, and quite a few species of mammals and birds have invented primitive tools which they use to gather and prepare food more efficiently even if they can't use them for cooking.

Apes are even closer to us than we ever imagined. Both gorillas and chimpanzees have proven capable of learning American Sign Language. They develop an impressive vocabulary and use it to demonstrate abstract thinking processes. The first time Koko saw a zebra she called it a white tiger. One of them taught it to her baby.

Let's see: high school is a zoo, government free clinics are veterinary hospitals, and prison is animal control

I'm not really arguing against that. I'm just pointing out that the word "animal" has a well-defined meaning and to misuse it is to abuse it.

It's not social life that sets us apart from all the other species. Whales, wolves, hyenas, budgies and myriad other species have a rich social life. Their inability to read doesn't differentiate them from us any more than it sets the indigenous people of the Amazon apart from us. What sets us apart from them is our qualitatively superior intelligence, which permits us to override our instincts to a degree that no other animal can approach.

We have more emotions than fear in common with the other pack-social mammals. All of them feel a sense of caring for their pack-mates and also depending on them. A member of an African canine species brazenly strode into a research camp and slowly dragged out his anesthetized pack-mate who was scheduled for a blood test. The scientists were so touched that they just let it happen. He overrode his instinctive fear to manifest his instinctive caring, just as most humans do for a pack-mate in trouble.

Most non-predatory birds are comfortable around other non-predatory species. Even birds that are not particularly social easily tolerate the proximity of other birds when feeding. When the weather warms up a little more I'll see blackbirds, finches, woodpeckers and several other species using my feeder together, with cardinals and pigeons cleaning up the ground underneath.

Nonetheless they're all programmed to recognize their own species. When it's time to migrate they flock together, and of course they will only do their mating dance for a female of their own species.