You are not a dumb animal!

In recent times, it has become fashionable to regard animals as furry
little people, and human beings as just another kind of animal. What a
lot of rubbish. Despite the best efforts of the animal rights
extremists to downplay the differences between animals and humans, the
fact remains that there is an enormous gulf between us and the rest of
the animal kingdom. A typical animal brain consumes about 5 percent of
its owners resting energy consumption. Your brain consumes 20 percent
of your resting energy consumption; the brain of a newborn baby
consumes a full 70 percent of its overall energy needs. Birth is an
arduous experience for us, typically lasting many hours. This is
because of the sheer size of the baby's head in relation to the
mother's pelvis and birth canal. Animals, by contrast, typically give
birth in a matter of moments, in a process that is almost effortless
by comparison. Within a matter of hours, most newborn animals can
stand and walk. Not so humans. It takes a couple of years for a human
infant to develop the same level of locomotor skills that newborn
animals already possess. The reason for this is that human babies are
born only partly developed, because otherwise the baby's brain would
be even larger and there is no way it could fit through the mothers'
birth canal.

With our large brains comes a level of intelligence far greater than
that of any other member of the animal kingdom. A couple of simple
experiments show this. Take an object that an animal wants, say a
favourite toy. As long as the animal can see it, it will try to get
it. Now hide that object under something in plain view of the animal.
Even though it saw you hide the object, provided it cannot see or
smell it, with very few exceptions the animal will not realise the
object is still there but hidden from view, and will make no attempt
to retrieve it. Another trick is to show an animal its own reflection
in a mirror. Most animals will react as if they are seeing another
member of their species, and either attempt to attack their reflection
or run away. I've heard it said that chimpanzees can recognise their
own reflection for what it is, but I suspect that could just be due to
wishful thinking on the researcher?s part. I recently saw a
documentary about apes, in which some of the apes had been given
pieces of mirror to play with. The commentator was enthusiastically
saying how the monkeys were looking at their own reflection, proving
that they were thinking, self-aware creatures. This was despite the
fact that all the monkeys were holding the pieces of mirror nearly
edge-on, at an angle which made it impossible for them to see their
own reflection. What they appeared to be looking at instead was the
trees and the sky reflected in these pieces of mirror. They'd been
given something that could have allowed them to see themselves as
others see them, and yet they used it to make pretty colours instead.
A person given a mirror for the first time would have acted very
differently. Not only are we far smarter than most animals, there is
something fundamentally different about the way our intellect works
that sets us apart from anything else in the animal kingdom. Only us
humans have religious beliefs, bury our dead and feel the need to wear
clothes.

Our intelligence gives us such an edge over animals that we've
inadvertently rendered many of them extinct. In fact, the time when
the first humans appeared can be fairly reliably dated to a little
over 100,000 years ago, because that's when the extinctions started.
As early humans spread across the globe, a wave of extinctions
accompanied them. There is no evidence of a single species ever having
had such an impact on other animal species before, demonstrating again
how different from animals us humans really are. Don't let anyone tell
you that people are just another kind of animal.

more at:
http://uk.geocities.com/dumb.animals/
.

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