[Potando]

It seems clear cut now when we grow up being told "everyone is equal", but that's because we have the luxury of seeing all moderns humans as a single species with no close living relatives. How would we classify Neanderthals if we found them alive today? How far removed from "our own race" do you have to go before something isn't a human? How about someone with a different number of chromosomes such as a Down's syndrome patient?

I think the real problem isn't classifying animals - aborigines really do have a different genetic history from every other race. It's that we somehow equate "not properly human" with "deserves to be abused". Until we can escape from that mentality, we're really no better than these zoo keepers. We've just moved the threshold a bit.