When do we cross the line from 'animal' to 'person?'

[Angrboda]

We did interbreed with neanderthals, humans outside of Africa have up to 4% neanderthal DNA. But I don't think they were really that much different from us.

I think my Aunt Aika is responsible for the lion's share of that 4%. Maybe 3% of it.

The reason we care about animals is, among other things, because they have eyes and faces, and we as a social species are built to project the perception of a mental subject upon things with eyes and faces. (There have been some interesting developmental studies in this regard, involving both humans and monkeys.) There's a reason there aren't many petting zoos with stocks of tarantulas, cuddle fish, octopus and the like. It's interesting to note that when people think of artificial intelligence, they imagine it inhabiting a metal box like your desktop PC and lacking any ability to display affect; such imaginings usually result in people denying sentience to such machine minds. However, if you give a machine social behaviors, such as the typed interaction with Weizenbaum's ELIZA program, or the cuddly behaviors of a robot equipped with the ability to express emotion via manipulating its facial expressions in a human-like way, you find people falling all over themselves to attribute some sort of personhood to the machine.

There appear to be some mixed themes being debated here, likely due to some ambiguity in the posing of the thread. It's not clear which is being asked, whether we should be considered animals no different from others in the animal kingdom, whether animals should be accorded rights similar to us because of certain commonalities, whether we have an ethical obligation to other non-human animals and what the basis and substance of that obligation is, or even whether we have special obligations to animals directly related to us aside from any general animal rights duties. I have addressed it from the question of what our ethical duties and obligations to those outside our species is, and refrained where this wasn't clear to be a poster's focus. However, on that end, I would say that regardless of whether we are animals, whether we have common foundations and modus operandii as other animals, and whether we are related to other animals does not, in my view, obligate us to take their interests on board as our own, any more than my being related to someone obligates me to pay their rent, fix their social problems, or even care. Similarity of type does not mandate similarity of care and commitment to their interests, and it's clear that for many of our interests, there's going to be inevitable conflict between furthering the ends of our species and behaviors which further the interests of other species, which almost inevitably reduce the survivability and quality of life for our species, no matter how modestly. (Feel free to talk to the cows, chickens and fish about where mankind's priorities lie.) I'm not going to get off into the question of plant rights or eco-system rights, but needless to say, those fields aren't purely idle, and some of their concerns aren't far removed from the ones in this discussion.

/rant