Are we humans special in some way that lets us play a unique role in the world?  Clearly yes.  We’ve done what no other species could in reshaping the entire surface of this planet, and we are unmatched and alone in our ability to manipulate features of our environment.  Not unique in being a tool-making species, true – a number of other animals have displayed that ability – but what anyone else has exhibited is much too limited to allow for any kind of meaningful comparison.  So in that sense, certainly, humans are special.

If you have any doubt about our ability to impact the natural world, consider that the fossil record suggests that the natural ‘baseline’ rate of extinction is about one species per million per year.  Methods of calculating today’s rate vary (as do estimates of the total number of species alive today) but scientists agree that today’s extinction rate is hundreds, and more likely thousands of times higher than the natural baseline rate.  On the other hand, the next time the heavens aims a ‘dinosaur killer’ asteroid at our world, we will be the only species who may be able to do something about it.  So yeah, we’re certainly unique.   We can alter features of our environment by many orders of magnitude better than anyone else.  For better or for worse.      

But if special means possessing a distinction that makes us qualitatively different from all other species, well, that gets a little murkier.

Are we by many orders of magnitude smarter than everyone else?  Not necessarily.  If fact, not likely.  Our cognitive abilities clearly exceed those of our next closest relatives, true.  Chimps and bonobos diverged from the line that became us about 6 million years ago.  Since that time the difference in DNA that’s evolved between ourselves and them is a bit less than 1½%, but that tiny difference turns out to mean a lot.  However, the other highest order intelligence on the planet doesn’t appear to be our closest relatives, and it’s probably hubris that lead us to assume it would naturally be the case.  

It turns out that the other highest order intelligence is a few representatives of an order of mammals with whom we primates last shared a common ancestor about 95 million years ago.  That’s back in the Cretaceous period.  The journey to sophisticated intelligence can proceed down a very different path from the one ours took, it would appear.  As our understanding of these beings advances, we’re getting pushed to the likely conclusion that we are not so intellectually superior after all.  

Cetacean ancestors lived on the land, but the remarkable intelligence their modern-day kin now possess evolved in a marine environment.  The requirements they faced as their cognitive capacity adapted to the needs of their environment were very different from those our terrestrial ancestors faced.  Natural selection would have necessarily picked very different traits to select for.  No advantage conferred on being able to build shelters, no way to settle in one place, or to accumulate possessions or wealth.  

As intelligence evolves within a watery realm, the advantage is in finding increasingly effective ways to interact with your environment that don’t require you to carry tools you’ve crafted with you.  Instead, the application of newly-evolved brainpower will likely go to into the development of highly efficient means of sharing information and coordinating strategy.  Group cohesion and co-operation will confer significant advantages.  It turns out that these are precisely the kinds of things at which dolphins excel.  Not unrelated to those are the powerful social bonds they exhibit towards others in the group.   

Cetacean brain physiology is impressive.  And we’re not just talking size… it’s also about complexity, and what we already understand about how cetacean brains are structured for social intelligence, language, and high-level cognition.  We still have a great deal to learn about them,  and don’t know enough to state it categorically yet,  but it’s entirely conceivable that some cetaceans are every bit as smart as we are.  That’s especially so with a number of  species of oceanic dolphins like the bottlenose, and with orcas and belugas, to name a few great examples.   

A comparison from Michigan State University concluded that cetaceans have an advantage over us in that their primary sense and their primary means of communication are both auditory.  (With us it’s primary sense = visual, while primary means of communication = auditory).   They have a number of ways to produce sounds, and using a combination of these they’re able to convey about “20 times the amount of information we can with our hearing”.   That fact alone should get our attention.

Another example (there are many):  specialized brain cells called spindle neurons, which are expected to be present in the brains of animals best able to “recognize, remember, reason, communicate, perceive, adapt to change, problem solve and understand” – all traits we associate with intelligence, are found in cetacean brains in numbers that suggest they do much more thinking than we would have previously guessed.  Then there’s the large, incredibly sophisticated limbic system found in the brains of orcas, which likely forms part of the explanation for the extraordinary social intelligence they exhibit.

In the end, we’ll probably find that whales and dolphins do some things better than we do, and vice versa.  Who is smarter won’t really matter all that much.  What does matter is that we humans, who happen to hold all the power in this relationship, ought to reimagine and revise how we treat these other sentient, sapient beings who inhabit our world.  

So, we can’t claim to be special by virtue of being so much smarter than everyone else.  We’re quite simply not.  If we’re going to reserve the concept of rights as being applicable only to ourselves, it would have to be on some other basis.  The ability to employ technological tools to dominate other species – and even the environments they inhabit – does not give us a moral basis for that dominion.  

Now to be clear, our compassion for any animal should never be limited to our estimation of its intelligence.  All individuals of every species deserve humane and compassionate treatment from us.  But our estimation of intelligence also matters, if we’re to treat other species appropriately.  This is because higher order animals have a greater capacity for suffering when killed, tortured, or deprived of their liberty.  What might constitute humane treatment varies considerably.  A fish that’s well cared for is presumably quite content living in an aquarium.  A sea lion much less so, and for a dolphin captivity is an unbearable hell.  We need to consider what the experience is like for that species.  We’ve all seen big cats pacing back and forth in a cage – a circumstance that can only be characterized as inhumane.  A goat might be happy enough living in a zoo.  Maybe.  A snow leopard most assuredly is not.  

Then when we factor in that highly intelligent animals are often very social, with crucially important bonds to other members of their family units in the wild – think orcas, or elephants – then once again we need to raise the bar. The relative isolation that comes with captivity is unnatural and psychologically damaging to such a being.  And in numerous, horrible cases, the isolation is total.  Consider the case of orcas Tokitae (Lolita) at the Miami Seaquarium, or Kiska at Marineland Canada.  Or the elephant Lucy at the Edmonton Zoo.  Such cases are by definition highly inhumane, and can be construed as nothing less than an egregious violation of the rights of these individuals.  

Fortunately, Canada is moving in the right direction with the Jane Goodall Bill  presently under consideration, which would bring us closer to recognizing legal standing for some of these higher order species.

It is time to consider pushing out our moral frontier to include others.  Nonhuman rights is a concept we’ve explored on our website, and have written about here on this blog.  I believe it’s essential that our own moral development take up this question.  At what point is an individual of a species deemed to have rights to self-determination?  Personhood rights?  Given what we already know about a number of other species, with dolphins being the most obvious example, what is implied about our proper course of action?

History shows that, as a civilization and with all of our relations to the natural world taken in their totality, we’ve gotten much, much better.  However, it remains true nonetheless that in an appalling number of instances, our treatment of other species means that we are guilty of grave injustices, and an unforgiveable deficit of compassion, if we continue to behave as we now do.  We can be much better.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Anna, Canadian Cetacean Alliance