> I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. What purpose would having this hierarchy serve? To justify which animals you

> I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. What purpose would having this hierarchy serve? To justify which animals you can eat? Despite many of the other comments, eating animals is outside the scope of this article and should take into account more factors than animal sentience. > I had to bail out. If you had stuck with the article a little longer, the reviewer would place de Waal's argument as directly counter to yours, although too long to quote in entirety: De Waal explicitly rejects the idea that there is some hierarchy of cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, an implicit tension in his book shows just how seductive the ladder-of-nature view remains. Simply saying that the “lower” creatures share abilities with creatures once considered more advanced still suggests something like a ladder—it’s just that chimps or crows or children are higher up than we thought. [...] As de Waal recognizes, a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems.