If animals were "uplifted" to high intelligence, would they behave like humans?

How would increased intelligence change the behavior of other animals?

  • Higher intelligence will likely lead to selfishness and greed and destruction

    Votes: 4 6.6%
  • Higher intelligence will not change the animals' behaviors significantly

    Votes: 3 4.9%
  • Each species of animal would be affected differently by increased intelligence

    Votes: 42 68.9%
  • They'll end up repeating what humans went though in our civilization's progression

    Votes: 6 9.8%
  • Something else (please explain)

    Votes: 6 9.8%

  • Total voters
    61

Albedo

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Yes, all of the above.

And don't forget that tigers are solitary animals, unlike humans, who evolved from highly social primates. That difference in sociality alone would make a sapient tiger act very differently to us.
 

Ravioli

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I have bred rats in adequate conditions, where they could develope naturally and reasonably, for years and observed human-like behavior. They cared for their weak, but there was also bullying of specific victims and a lot of other ugly things typically human.

Chimpanzees rape.

I don't think animals would make better (ie. nicer) humans. WE are animals ourselves; we share DNA, we are anatomically identical to mammals in that we have 2 eyes, 1 nose, 1 mouth, and 4 legs - we are not that different and there is no reason that evil and ill intent should be exclusive to us.

Animals can be mean and petty. My bitch always attacks my male dog when he gets even the lousiest of treats while she has gotten the same or better. She will drop a meaty bone to shred him over a stale bisquit. She will attack him for his toy. Whatever he finds and takes an interest in, she attacks him for when she doesn't care for it otherwise.

I work at a pet shop. There are 3 love birds left out of 10. One customer bought a single bird so there is one without a partner. Two are a couple, and the loner tries to inch in on them and share in on the affection. The male of the couple however, keeps getting in the way in the most hilarious manners. He doesn't straight out attack. He holds his foot in the intruder's face, he shrills and beaks at him over his mate's shoulder, and flutters in between the two to separate them. When she looks at the intruder, her mate nips and shrieks at her to remind her, "Biotch, you mine".

A cat of mine would bully the newbie. Once, it was winter, the sliding door to the back yard was open just wide enough for the newb to come in. Snow was thick and it was freezing. Instead of seeking a warm cushion, my cat would squeeze herself right in the small crack of the door and stare at the newb, daring him to try and get out of the cold. It was cruel, yet hilarious.

Give them human-level brains if you wanna see the world burn.
 

benbradley

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cornflake

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I have bred rats in adequate conditions, where they could develope naturally and reasonably, for years and observed human-like behavior. They cared for their weak, but there was also bullying of specific victims and a lot of other ugly things typically human.

Chimpanzees rape.

I don't think animals would make better (ie. nicer) humans. WE are animals ourselves; we share DNA, we are anatomically identical to mammals in that we have 2 eyes, 1 nose, 1 mouth, and 4 legs - we are not that different and there is no reason that evil and ill intent should be exclusive to us.

Animals can be mean and petty. My bitch always attacks my male dog when he gets even the lousiest of treats while she has gotten the same or better. She will drop a meaty bone to shred him over a stale bisquit. She will attack him for his toy. Whatever he finds and takes an interest in, she attacks him for when she doesn't care for it otherwise.

I work at a pet shop. There are 3 love birds left out of 10. One customer bought a single bird so there is one without a partner. Two are a couple, and the loner tries to inch in on them and share in on the affection. The male of the couple however, keeps getting in the way in the most hilarious manners. He doesn't straight out attack. He holds his foot in the intruder's face, he shrills and beaks at him over his mate's shoulder, and flutters in between the two to separate them. When she looks at the intruder, her mate nips and shrieks at her to remind her, "Biotch, you mine".

A cat of mine would bully the newbie. Once, it was winter, the sliding door to the back yard was open just wide enough for the newb to come in. Snow was thick and it was freezing. Instead of seeking a warm cushion, my cat would squeeze herself right in the small crack of the door and stare at the newb, daring him to try and get out of the cold. It was cruel, yet hilarious.

Give them human-level brains if you wanna see the world burn.

I don't find that hilarious.

I don't see how those behaviours, specific to those animals, are different from those behaviours in humans, easily observed.

I'm sure lots of people could share stories of loving cooperation and selfless generosity they've seen non-human animals exhibit.

I just saw a story about someone who took in a second dog. The person lived on a large, rural property, where first dog was often tied with a lead to the porch, to sit and lay and wander when his people were about. He didn't try to run off, but it was safer. The new dog was leashed in the same manner, but apparently wanted to explore. She chewed through her leash and dashed off the porch. The person was on the property, saw it, and headed toward the house, but before he got close, the new dog saw the old dog still on the porch, so ran back and hurriedly chewed through his leash so he could come with. They dashed off on a little adventure together and were back that afternoon, buds.

Remember the toddler who fell into the gorilla enclosure in a zoo and was picked up and cradled by a gorilla who waited and then gently placed him right by the door so the humans could fetch him easily?

How many elephants adopt orphans? How many other animals adopt orphans, even those not their own species? How many stories of dogs refusing to leave their friends or humans behind, even at risk to their own safety? We're animals; yeah all animals can be mean, but I'd wager we're worse.
 

Brutal Mustang

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I don't know why people have the need to call animals (and babies) 'pure' or 'selfless', or any of that. They are not. Their selfish simplicity is what makes them so damn lovable and amusing. If they were smart, they would wreck havoc on the Earth just as we adult humans have.

'Human' problems are not 'human' problems. They're sentience problems.
 

Ravioli

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I don't find that hilarious.

I don't see how those behaviours, specific to those animals, are different from those behaviours in humans, easily observed.

I'm sure lots of people could share stories of loving cooperation and selfless generosity they've seen non-human animals exhibit.

I just saw a story about someone who took in a second dog. The person lived on a large, rural property, where first dog was often tied with a lead to the porch, to sit and lay and wander when his people were about. He didn't try to run off, but it was safer. The new dog was leashed in the same manner, but apparently wanted to explore. She chewed through her leash and dashed off the porch. The person was on the property, saw it, and headed toward the house, but before he got close, the new dog saw the old dog still on the porch, so ran back and hurriedly chewed through his leash so he could come with. They dashed off on a little adventure together and were back that afternoon, buds.

Remember the toddler who fell into the gorilla enclosure in a zoo and was picked up and cradled by a gorilla who waited and then gently placed him right by the door so the humans could fetch him easily?

How many elephants adopt orphans? How many other animals adopt orphans, even those not their own species? How many stories of dogs refusing to leave their friends or humans behind, even at risk to their own safety? We're animals; yeah all animals can be mean, but I'd wager we're worse.

I never denied they were capable of good, but I refuse to do the whole warm fuzzy lovey-dovey "animals are so much better than humans" thing. Humans are capable of good, too and yet we insist on inflicting cruelty on the world.
What evidence do you have that we would still be worse than animals if animals had our capabilities? So what if a gorilla rescued a kid - so do we. So what if elephants adopt - so do humans. Every "unusual" good things animals do, we do tenfold. We also do as many times the damage animals do, but there is no evidence that animals would be more ethical than us.

Humans are mostly not cruel for sadism but because the cruelty serves their purposes. Animals have purposes too. We are good while doing good doesn't get in our way, and within the same extent animals do good. If harming everyone around them will keep them warm through the winter, then animals, too, will cut down forests to light themselves cozy little fires. If it will expand their territory and fatten them beyond their needs, they will pump oil and butcher Arabs all over again. Animals, like us, have always served their own purposes first and done charity later. There is no reason for that to change when they can do the things we do.
 

cornflake

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I don't know why people have the need to call animals (and babies) 'pure' or 'selfless', or any of that. They are not. Their selfish simplicity is what makes them so damn lovable and amusing. If they were smart, they would wreck havoc on the Earth just as we adult humans have.

'Human' problems are not 'human' problems. They're sentience problems.

If you're referring to my post, I mentioned selfless acts. I don't think other animals, or human children god knows, are pure or selfless as a cohort.

I do think they're smart, on a continuum, same as humans, but I think they'd likely wreak less havoc.

I never denied they were capable of good, but I refuse to do the whole warm fuzzy lovey-dovey "animals are so much better than humans" thing. Humans are capable of good, too and yet we insist on inflicting cruelty on the world.
What evidence do you have that we would still be worse than animals if animals had our capabilities? So what if a gorilla rescued a kid - so do we. So what if elephants adopt - so do humans. Every "unusual" good things animals do, we do tenfold. We also do as many times the damage animals do, but there is no evidence that animals would be more ethical than us.

Humans are mostly not cruel for sadism but because the cruelty serves their purposes. Animals have purposes too. We are good while doing good doesn't get in our way, and within the same extent animals do good. If harming everyone around them will keep them warm through the winter, then animals, too, will cut down forests to light themselves cozy little fires. If it will expand their territory and fatten them beyond their needs, they will pump oil and butcher Arabs all over again. Animals, like us, have always served their own purposes first and done charity later. There is no reason for that to change when they can do the things we do.

Sure humans do good things, and other animals do jerky things.

I do think humans are much more often cruel for, basically, sadistic purposes though, yeah. I think people tend to enjoy it - a lot more than I think other animals tend to, or more people tend to than I think similar numbers of other animals tend to. Other animals (at least a number that we've tested for this), same as us, want things to be fair, and are aggrieved when stuff is not.

It's an opinion, but I tend to think we're a particularly nasty, self-serving and destructive species. I don't know that we always were, but right now? I think the world would be better off if like, the elephants were in charge, yeah.
 

Brutal Mustang

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Somewhere I ran into a video I wished I hadn't, of a pack of young male chimps tossing around and tearing apart a baby chimp for the sport of it. They were grinning, and seemed to be having a good time, while the baby died a slow, horrible death.

Animals are no different than humans. It's just that, because of sentience, the good or bad humans do is often magnified a million fold. Or billions fold, if you consider how one human can affect the lives of billions. A dickish chimp, on the other hand, will only affect the 20 other chimps in its near vicinity.
 

cornflake

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Somewhere I ran into a video I wished I hadn't, of a pack of young male chimps tossing around and tearing apart a baby chimp for the sport of it. They were grinning, and seemed to be having a good time, while the baby died a slow, horrible death.

Animals are no different than humans. It's just that, because of sentience, the good or bad humans do is often magnified a million fold. Or billions fold, if you consider how one human can affect the lives of billions. A dickish chimp, on the other hand, will only affect the 20 other chimps in its near vicinity.

How are you attributing that to sentience and not the happenstance of ruling the planet?

Also why do you think what you saw was for sport? Chimps can indeed be very violent, but not generally just for the hell of it.

I once saw a horrible video of a sea lion take another sea lion's cub and chuck it down a crevasse. I still remember the mother's screaming and the sight of the other sea lions holding her back with their flippers as she tried to dive down after her baby.

It wasn't sport - the two of them had been in a fight a few minutes before. The fight broke up, the one went and grabbed the other's baby and tossed it down the crevasse.
 
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Albedo

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I think it's general knowledge that humanity's closest relatives are also pricks. But I can't think of any other extremely intelligent animals that go out of their way to hurt each other. There's violence everywhere, but mostly it seems situational: territorial, infanticide etc. Which dolphins, whales, elephants, crows, etc. torture each other's children just for fun?

Is sociopathy a specifically primate flaw?
 

Ravioli

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How are you attributing that to sentience and not the happenstance of ruling the planet?

Also why do you think what you saw was for sport? Chimps can indeed be very violent, but not generally just for the hell of it.

They are strong and smart enough to kill unwanted offspring quickly and not play with it.

It reminds me of that buffalo herd finding a dead lion cub and abusing it, as if to vent their hatred for lions. The poor thing was obviously dead and they kept abusing it. Other than scavengers, no animal pays any mind to tiny cadavers. But those buffalo went out of their way to pick that one up with their horns and fling it around.

Contrarywise, I'm still in awe about the orca who took a baby seal back to shore, or the lioness who snuggled around with a baby wildebeest, though I think she was sick. She looked sick. Full of ticks in her face, probably tick fever messing with her brains. Or maybe hormones gone wrong.

It wasn't sport - the two of them had been in a fight a few minutes before. The fight broke up, the one went and grabbed the other's baby and tossed it down the crevasse.
There are fights for sensible reasons such as resources, mates, and territory. And then there is a bunch of grown, highly intelligent animals playing soccer with a baby. Chimps are smarter than those blobs of fat that are sea lions, and rather than lumbering around in faceless colonies, extremely family-oriented and tight among one-another. They nurse and care for each other's babies. There is no reason for them to gang up on a baby and kill it slowly by passing it around to be abused if they just want it dead and over with. They can tear prey monkeys' heads off with a single yank.

There is killing for survival, killing by accident, and there is killing for fun.
 

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I think the original question is somewhat wrong, as it automatically presumes that the Human race is the most intelligent which we aren't. I think Dolphins have it over us, they can do some amazing things with sonar etc.

The question should be what would happen if the animals could become dextrous - ie have thumbs, now that would cause a revolution.

I personally see all living sentient beings as my equal, that includes trees etc. I also feel the Human Race is way behind on spirtuality with a lot of animals way ahead of us. If you want the material world yep we are the leader, but in other areas we lag well behind.
 

Shadow_Ferret

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Do you mean, do I think a suddenly intelligent lion will stop in the middle of a hunt and say, "I believe it is morally wrong for us to hunt the noble antelope and from this day forward we lions will become vegetarians. Meat is murder."?

No.
 

benbradley

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I think the original question is somewhat wrong, as it automatically presumes that the Human race is the most intelligent which we aren't. I think Dolphins have it over us, they can do some amazing things with sonar etc.
They should already have (or be able to learn) language - with their utterances they have the ability to send Morse code.

The question should be what would happen if the animals could become dextrous - ie have thumbs, now that would cause a revolution.
In my view that would give evolutionary opportunity for long-term growth of the animal's brain.

It may be medically possible to surgically modify an animal to give it opposable thumbs, based on what I've heard about reconstruction surgery for people. But I could hear some ethical objections, as well as it being a rather expensive experiment with what most would see as dubious results.
I personally see all living sentient beings as my equal, that includes trees etc. I also feel the Human Race is way behind on spirtuality with a lot of animals way ahead of us. If you want the material world yep we are the leader, but in other areas we lag well behind.
I dunno, to me those other areas are more elusive that Dark Matter.
Do you mean, do I think a suddenly intelligent lion will stop in the middle of a hunt and say, "I believe it is morally wrong for us to hunt the noble antelope and from this day forward we lions will become vegetarians. Meat is murder."?

No.
I'm reminded of this joke.
 

robjvargas

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I think the original question is somewhat wrong, as it automatically presumes that the Human race is the most intelligent which we aren't. I think Dolphins have it over us, they can do some amazing things with sonar etc.

The question should be what would happen if the animals could become dextrous - ie have thumbs, now that would cause a revolution.

I personally see all living sentient beings as my equal, that includes trees etc. I also feel the Human Race is way behind on spirtuality with a lot of animals way ahead of us. If you want the material world yep we are the leader, but in other areas we lag well behind.

Have you ever seen the way a group of male dolphins will attack a female for mating?
 

cornflake

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They should already have (or be able to learn) language - with their utterances they have the ability to send Morse code.

You say this as if they don't have language. Of course they do. I saw a video of some Seaworld 'researchers' mapping some Dolphin language by isolating one dolphin from another, asking one to, say, bounce a ball twice, then bringing the other out and having the one dolphin direct the other in what the human jerks wanted, then reisolating the dolphin and changing it to three bounces and repeating, to see what the difference was between 'human jerk says bounce the thing two times' to 'three times,' though I recall it being hard to isolate a single change, presumably because it was cluttered with 'what is with them, omg with this stupidity, btw, three, like I've got time for this crap today?' Heh.

However, other research has proven more fruitful. The latter link has links to other research of the same ilk.

As to implanting opposable thumbs, I can't even with the horror of that kind of experimentation.

However, even disregarding that, I don't think it'd really be demonstrable of anything. Would a grafted digit of that ilk work the same without the corresponding ligature and whatever else, and neurological connections? I don't know, but it just seems like there'd need to be more.

It's like a cochlear implant or something. You can't just put one in to an adult or even a decently old child and turn it on and have them process sound correctly. If the pathways weren't developed when they should have been, there needs to be extensive therapy to try to force connections that are missing.
 
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Wrenware

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I think it may be worth noting that human beings were around for about 200,000 years before the agricultural revolution, where we transitioned from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to a settlement-based existence. This was about 12,000 years ago. We attained behavioral modernity about 50,000 years ago, which is when we started to do things like cave paint, dance and sing.

So, for the vast majority of our history, we humans have not been "intelligent" in the way of building complex civilizations, reading and writing, producing art, having philosophical thoughts, farming, etc.

What caused humans to make these big leaps forward? Well, schools are divided on whether they were the result of biological, sociological or environmental changes. We don't really know, although it was probably a combination of factors, and likewise we don't really know if the whole thing was one big fluke (or, indeed, a confluence of lots of little flukes).

Put another way, even if you did uplift a bunch of animals to sentience, unless you specifically raised them with a human socio-interactive template (in which case, they would presumably act a lot like humans), there's no guarantee that they'll form anything similar to what we currently think of as a human society, because there doesn't seem to have been any guarantee that humans would form anything similar to our current society.
 
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DrDoc

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Tools may or may not be critical. For all we know, whales ARE more intelligent than humans. But, look at their constraints: body form and environment. They have to breathe air, so they can't build cities on the ocean floor. They have no thumbs, so how could they, in all their great intelligence, even consider the idea of tools? Their communication is so sophisticated that we have not yet been able to figure out what they are saying; but we have no problem figuring out (eventually) what other human languages mean. For all we know, whales have figured out everything, and all they have to do now is eat and procreate.

Regards,

DrDoc
 

Albedo

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And humans have been known to eat and procreate.

Whales seem to have their priorities right, but. None of this civilization nonsense, they mostly avoid predators and live to a ripe old age, and they seem to have fun.

They may not strictly be as intelligent as us, but they're def smarter.
 

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The main thing whales have is communication and long life and a very large brain. Given that they don't have the distractions that come with tool-making (e.g. inventions) they have more time to just contemplate. They may truly excel in yoga, meditation, discourse, logic and mathematics.

Imagine once we discover how to communicate with them that we learn just how "civilized" they are.
 

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And humans have been known to eat and procreate.

Whales seem to have their priorities right, but. None of this civilization nonsense, they mostly avoid predators and live to a ripe old age, and they seem to have fun.

They may not strictly be as intelligent as us, but they're def smarter.

Many whale species suffer significant loss of young to orcas. Once they get past a certain size, though, predation loss is rare.
 

neandermagnon

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I suppose the ability to form the foundations of civilizations would be the criteria. But is it possible that high intelligence won't naturally lead to formation of a sophisticated civilization? What if really intelligent lions choose to live in exactly the same way it always had, just more efficiently? They'd just hunt and breed and play as usual, with no motivation to create an economy, more complex methods of communication, art, political system, religion, etc.

There are modern hunter-gatherer cultures in the world today that haven't built a complex civilisation yet are just as intelligent and creative as all the other humans currently on the planet. We're all descended from Africans that lived approx 60,000 years ago and they had the same cognitive capacity as modern humans.

The things that makes the biggest difference in regards to developing a civilisation or not is 1. necessity - if you can live happily and safely and stay well fed as a hunter-gatherer, then why bother? 2. access to a wide network of knowledge. No-one, absolutely no-one, built a civilisation without relying on the pooled knowledge of a large network of people and all their ancestors. Compare that to these people who live as hunter-gatherers on a completely isolated island in the ocean, probably no more than a few hundred people in total, with no connection to other populations. Their pool of knowledge is much smaller and they have everything they need on their island. (BTW there really is a tribe like this, and various other hunter-gatherer tribes some isolated, others not isolated but still choosing to live their traditional way of life)

Human level intelligence is usually defined as the ability to transmit large amounts of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. All human populations do this. The above-mentioned isolated hunter-gatherers still transmit vast amounts of cultural knowledge. This includes the ability to make accurate, deadly hunting weapons from stuff you find in the forest/plains/etc around you, knowledge of all the edible plant species, which parts can be eaten, the best time of year to gather them, plus knowledge of gathering other foods (insects, honey from bees), trapping small animals, plus how to build shelters from stuff you find around you, where and how to find water that's suitable for drinking, how to navigate across the lands you live in, everything else that's necessary for survival, and also a rich tradition of storytelling, art/crafts and music.

All human societies have complex knowledge (both practical and creative arts type skills/knowledge), one way or another. you can find traces of these things in the fossil record that show that Africans living around 70,000 - 100,000 years ago had all these things. There's enough evidence to suggest that Neandertals* had all these things, though the evidence for art is very limited. The evidence that they had a complex language and complex culture is abundant though. They were a different species so may not have been exactly the same as us but they were definitely highly intelligent.

*mythbusting: 1. Neandertals were a cousin species, not an ancestral species 2. the popular stereotype of them being brutish and unintelligent is so wrong and incorrect I can't even find the words. They were either as intelligent as us, or they fell short by a very narrow margin. It was previously thought they were less creative and innovative than us but even this is being questioned now. Their level of technology was lower but their population sizes were smaller than Homo sapiens, and I've already explained above regarding how a smaller pool of knowledge can explain a comparative lack of technological advancement even when two groups are equally as intelligent/creative.

So, back to the question about animals... humans tend to get a bit up themselves and think that there's lightyears of difference separating them from animals, but there's not. It's actually really hard to define what is uniquely human, i.e. things all human societies do that no non-human animals do. This is because our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are so damn clever (and humans go and make the gap even smaller by teaching bonobos to do stuff like use language, make stone tools and start fires... shout out to Kanzi, bonobo genius who even has his own Wikipedia page )

Chimps and bonobos transmit cultural knowledge from one generation to the next (i.e. the very thing that defines human behaviour) but the quantity and type of knowledge isn't the same and they don't have a complex language that they use to transmit it. Even when they learn language from humans, they can't use it to the same extent - they can understand things like "go into the garden and get me the ball" but can't understand "go and get me the ball from the garden" and they also never ask questions out of curiosity - this indicates that they only use language to achieve a purpose, like getting food or a toy - humans use language like this but also use it for social bonding (chit chat, small talk, learning about other people or things because it's interesting). Chimps and bonobos don't really have creative arts, although some behaviour has been observed in chimps that may be a precursor behaviour to this, i.e. drumming on things, which might be interpreted a bit more like wolves howling to draw the pack together and/or to do with dominance hierarchies within the group.

The question about how you differentiate between human and animal intelligence is a vital one to ask before going into questions like in the OP, and the answer to that question is that the line is way, way thinner than you thought it was.