Human Superiority Myth Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Human Superiority Myth - Essay Example What is right for us can be wrong for them. Stephen Budiansky, the author of the book If Lions Could Talk considers animals as intelligent as we are, but explains that it is another kind of intelligence. To test animal intelligence for him is the same as to test a blind person giving him a written IQ test. Budiansky asserts that every animal has his own sort of intelligence. Monkeys performed far superior to rats in test based in visual discriminations, though rats are better in the same test based in smell discrimination. "The branching tree of evolution has not just one culmination, but millions of culminations -- represented in every living species on earth today," he writes. "Each is a brilliant success at what it does." And it is the nature of such "brilliance" that remains to ponder" (Gabriel, 2000). As for language, animals speak, but their way of communication differs from ours. Researcher have counted that our closest relatives, apes, with whom humans share an astonishing 98.4% DNA, use nearly 68 different sounds in their communication. "Orangutans may have the most impressive individual call of any ape, the long call. It begins with a low soft grumble, modulating in pitch like a string bass player using vibrato" ("The Animal Communication Project", n.d.). This one means that this territory has an owner and possibly calls females. Some orangutans accompany this call by crashing snags. In response this call triggers long calls from neighboring males. The pant-hoot - is one of the best-studied chimpanzee vocalizations. "It begins with breathy, low-pitched hoots that segue into a series of quicker, higher-pitched in-and-out pants, as if the chimp were trying to play harmonica without an instrument. Finally the pant-hoot builds to a loud... The researcher states that human superiority is reconsidered today. Its peak is the animal rights movement, which final aim is to equate humans and animals beyond the law. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, argues that we need to extend rights to the great apes, in the first instance, followed by all other animal species. People have always considered the most distinctive feature between them and animals the sophisticated language. As Joel Wallman, author of Aping Language, explains, "...language, at least in the European intellectual tradition, is the quintessential human attribute, at once evidence and source of most that is transcendent in us, distinguishing ours from the merely mechanical nature of the beast". In the 18th century a French philosophy, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, wrote a book titled L’Homme Machine. He thought that all the creatures on the Earth are the mere machines and suggested that the reason animals â€Å"cannot speak is not because of any inf eriority in rationality to human beings but because of ‘some defect in the organs of speech.’ He believed a young ape could be taught the use of language†. The researcher then concluds that people have overestimated our superiority and this has led to the colossal losses in nature. We use animals in our needs: kill them for fun, abuse in experiments; take from them their living territory, treat cruelly. Nobody has given us such a right. And we must do our best to save and preserve what can be still saved and preserved and make animals our friends.