Cephalopod Awareness Day 2024 is on Friday, October 4, 2024: Question on animals and humans?

Friday, October 4, 2024 is Cephalopod Awareness Day 2024. International Cephalopod Awareness Days Cephalopod Awareness Days

I'm confused as to your own position. Are you looking for counter-arguments to "anthropomorphism is bad and it is dangerous to believe humans and animals are equal"?

As a matter of semantics, humans ARE an animal. Humans belong in the animal kingdom.

There's a famous controversial ethicist named Peter Singer who makes arguments on the same topic as the ones you're talking about, which he elaborates on in books like "Animal Liberation" and "Practical Ethics". Singer notes that people commonly use our greater intelligence, awareness, and cognitive abilities as a validation to differentiate us (ethically) from the rest of the animals. But, he says, there are some humans, such as infants and the severely mentally disabled, who obviously do not have the level of consciousness of a normal adult human, and there are also some non-human animals (at least other apes, whales, dolphins, etc.) who possess a higher level of consciousness than a human infant or severely mentally disabled human. So, he reasons, there are no non-arbitrary ways for humans to categorize all other animals as morally irrelevant beings if we accept that infants are not morally irrelevant.

Singer's answer to critics who say that this would mean we'd treat babies and handicapped people like we treat chimps or pigs is that, on the contrary, he is arguing that the moral status of animals should be upgraded, without downgrading the moral status of any subset of humans.

In any case, one should avoid anthropomorphism, even if you are in favor of "expanding the moral circle" to include some non-human animals (conservatively, just to apes and cetaceans; liberally, to all vertebrates, cephalopods, maybe a few arthropods). If you've ever seen "Dog Whisperer", Cesar Milan notes that people give their dog anxiety issues when they treat their dog like a human instead of a dog.

P.S. - Animals ARE as evolved as we are. Every life-form that exists in the present day is just as evolved as every other present day life-form. Humans are NOT the finish line of evolution. It is true to say that we have technology and an extremely complex society and other animals do not, but biologically speaking we are just as evolved as an orangutan, a frog, a shark, or a bacterium.