The ant has never considered the process by which sugars can ferment into a pleasant poison. The ant has never cried after reading a short story. The ant has never felt that it would pine away from love. The ant has never stopped to consider that a dead leaf is beautiful beyond it's material being. The ant can't even knit a stupid costume and prance around at conventions pretending to be some sort of anthropomorphic animal. The ant sleeps and works as it is told and shits and fights and dies as it is told. The ants go to war and lions devour their mates and countless species kill their own young, and every plant that grows in the forest strangled a dozen others that never reached the soil that it could have that patch of growth. The difference is in the capacity and understanding, for an animal is capable only of little good and little evils, and a human being is capable of great goods and great evils. It is this capacity that produces greatness, not a difference of scale in good or evil; and the entire production would be without an audience otherwise. When those who had gone before asked if a tree falling in a forest made a sound, it was not the 'when-you-close-the-fridge-door-does-the-light-stay-on' jest of your childhood, nor was it to be taken literally, but to ask; what purpose any of this, if not to be observed? If we do not appreciate the sounds of music, what does it do but echo dimly into nothingness?

Some small handful of animals show real signs of sentience or near sentience. They might one day, a million years from now, be like us. Those who would revert to a lesser form of life are fools and slaves that cling to their chains, desperately afraid of the responsibilities of freedom.

At any rate, I'll have no more of the rich and spoiled children of excess bleating nonsensically of their ill-informed and ill-conceived opinions inspired by an insipid PBS special.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? - Shakespeare's Hamlet