HUMAN SUPERIORITY

The predator Homo sapiens has a set of adaptive advantages that are an
expression of the functional capacities of our greatly enlarged
cerebral cortex. These advantages include our capacity to reason, to
develop and use languages, to think creatively and in the abstract,
etc. It does not matter to what extent these higher intellectual
functions may be shared, in part, by a few other nonhuman species. The
fact that we are the only species that has all of these capacities and
we use them to create our overwhelming technology makes us superior to
any other animal on Earth. By equating a human being with a labratory
rat, you are demeaning humans.

[paraphrased from:
Sharon M. Russell and Charles S. Nicholl. "A Dissection of the
Chapter "Tools for Research" in Peter Singer's Animal
Liberation". Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology
and Medicine. February 1996, Vol.211 No.2. pp.109-138]