According to John Lloyd, Senior Research Ecologist at Ecostudies Institute, there are currently about two million species that have been given an official name living on Earth today and the number of those that have yet to acquire names is higher yet. Majority of the amount of species mentioned consists of invertebrates, animals that lack a backbone; however, there are still roughly around fifty thousand of named vertebrates in existence. If looking at one vertebrae group specifically, the mammalian group for example, it is interesting to find that there are many classifications within classifications to go through to come even close to fully understanding the anatomy of a specific being. Among mammalian classifications, we are able to find birds, dogs, bears, cats, apes, and humans. So what is it exactly that distinguishes humans, the only surviving species of the homo genus, from the rest of the animal kingdom? It wouldn’t be completely inadequate to assume that it is indeed the ability to reason which puts human animals ahead of the nonhuman animals.
Human animals have a highly complex brain that has the ability to rationalize specific situations and act accordingly to influence the outcome of it. Even though nonhuman animal’s anatomy can be very similar to that of a human animal’s, like that of a chimpanzee, it is indeed the intellect that draws the fine line between the two and separates, according to Tom Reagan, the moral patient from the moral agent. The ability to ponder, reason, solve, invent, and thrive intellectually are the dominating factors distinguishing one group from the other.
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