First, I just want to say hello to Julia, an old friend from Ancient Sites.

I agree that most boundaries separating human animals and non-human animals are artificial and arbitrary. Jane Goodall's research into chimpanzee behavior tore down many of these artificial boundaries. The wonderful thing about Jane was that she was not an academic at the time of her research so she had not been taught the scientific dogma of separateness between humans and other species. She saw things with the unbiased eyes of a child.

Unfortunately not all boundaries between species are artificial. The most important of these is the boundary of communication. Some apes in laboratory conditions have been taught sign language with a limited vocabulary of about 600 symbols. This comes tantalizing close to destroying the communication barrier between apes and humans, but falls short in providing a method to plumb the depths of ape consciousness. Whether apes desire to plumb the depths of human consciousness remains a mystery for now...