I think some of the things that separate humans from the animal kingdom is that humans have the God given ability to reason and to project that reasoning ability into language, speech, technology, imagination, and awareness; but I think more important than that is that humans also have the God given ability to realize and understand ethics, morals, and justice. I think that the evolutionists have spent so much time and energy attempting to train certain animals to act like humans that the evolutionists seem to have developed a proclivity to put animals doing tricks on equal footing with human emotions such as love, joy, and affection.
The fault in your reasoning is that animals do have the ability to reason, though domestication can limit it. Wild wolves are capable of solving problems of food access that most domesticated dogs cannot. When a dog wants to go for a walk, master does not get the message, and the dog grabs the leash that indicates reasoning rather than just conditioning because the dog not only associates the leash with taking a walk, but expects the master will as well.
The fault in your reasoning is that animnals do develop language and speech, as in the howls of wolves, and the songs of whales, with often significant complexity in what they convey.
The fault in your reasoning is that they do develop technology, as in the nests of birds, the air circulation systems in burrows of prairie dogs, and the chimpanzee’s use of tools – all in nautre without human influence or intervention.
The fault in your reasoning is that animals do have imagination and awareness. Orcas not only communicate, but have individual names for each olther, which they recall after years of separation. They are aware they are being watched by man, and play up to that. For a brief period several decades ago a pod under observation in Puget Sound began intentionally putting on shows for their observers. They stunned salmon, and before eating them juggled them around during hops, or balanced them on the tips of their noses, and shortly after that abruptly stopped the behavior. It was not a normal behavior, but quite entertaining to thier observers. Its implications from a communication standpoint as evidence of imagination and awareness are compelling.
Animals also exercise ethics, morals, and justice, though following their own exigencies rather than human abstractions. They understand their own genetic rules on recognizing territorial boundaries, and protecting their own family groups above those outside. Predators rarely kill more than they can eat, or just for fun. Porpoises have been known to rescue humans at sea. They recognize social orders and generally comply with them.
Dogs have been proven to have a sense of fairness in formal studies. Anecdotally, a somewhat famous stray dog named Bum who befriended an abandoned blind burro named Shorty in Fairplay, Colo. (mid-20th Century) when given food always carried it to Shorty first then accepted a portion for himself. This was not a trained behavior. Bum also led Shorty to the greener parts of pastures for better food than the aging burro could find on his own. The town maintains a monument to these two animals to this day.
Also anecdotally, a relative of mine had a dog with a litter in the house, and a cat with a litter in the barn. He killed the cat’s litter, three kittens. The cat later got into the house and killed exactly three puppies, but left the others.
Before parroting such sweeping fallacial statements from those who are not fully informed you should perhaps examine “Sociobiology” by E.O. Wilson and “The Triumph of Sociobiology” by James Alcock. I would recommend in association with those “The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene” by Walter Goldschmidt, “Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion,” by Lee Kirkpatrick, and “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society” by David Sloan Wilson.
These create a very clear picture of how all of Creation has the same inherent tendencies connecting us with our Creator. We are mere creatures without baptism, which is how we become children of God. However, our affinity for the divine is carved so deep within our genes that seeking it emerges biologically even without divine intervention. As the Catechism says, God reaches out to Man, and Man responds. The Bible is the story of how this advancement of our relationship with God transpired and our rise from being creatures to slowly understanding where we exist before our Creator.
What makes us special is that the Creator, through his incarnation, chose to expereince his own creation firsthand as a human, and that is an eternal part of his indentity. That sancitifies what we are, and has nothing to do with humnanity on its own. It is by our biological connection to the rest of Creation that his Incarnation sanctifies all the rest of Creation as well. I intend this not as past tense or presnt tense. It is. It remains part of God’s eternal nature and this connection we provide woth all else is part of what makes us special in his eyes – not of our own nature, but of his nature in us through Christ.
