[taylorius]

Interesting that you point out the fact that they can't speak. I wonder how much of our willingness to mark animals out as, in some sense, lower than us is down to their lack of human vocalisation ability. I sometimes worry that their thoughts are closer to ours than we give credit for.

[optymizer]

I only used 'speak' because the person I was replying to had said:

> What would a dog answer

To me it's interesting that they chose to give a dog the ability to answer. Certainly the ability to speak like a human would factor in 'how much like humans they are'. It's a way of humanizing the dog, which introduces bias, making the dog more human than it really is.

There is no need to pretend dogs are almost people to justify treating them well.

[taylorius]

Sure, I wasn't trying to catch you out :-) and I agree that animals should be treated well, of course.

Your mention of speaking just reminded me of a thought I'd had, regarding how we measure where animals' sit on the human-ness scale. I think that metric has a lot of biases in how we weight its constituent factors. I.e. how well an animal can communicate with us - which might be quite orthogonal to its intelligence. (For example an octopus)