Stephen Budiansky's 1999 book If a Lion Could Talk: How Animals Think was an excellent take-down of the tendency to view animal behaviour in terms of human behaviour, imputing to animals motives such as humility or generosity. Such anthropomorphism is often mistaken for a continuation of the Darwinian revolution's removal of man's unique status in the natural world. But we are unique: we have culture, we have language, we have morality. Animals are capable of remarkable things: they can echo-locate, or migrate across the world, or swoop down through the air at over 100mph, but they can't make a tapestry, or feel sorry for the homeless, or write a play no matter how many of them you sit down in front of a typewriter. It betrays a lack of imagination to judge their intelligence by the extent to which they mirror – or seem to mirror – human traits.
Now here's Budiansky on the same topic, reviewing Dale Peterson's The Moral Life of Animals in the WSJ:
Animal-rights campaigners have long sought to narrow the distance between humans and animals by showcasing appealing stories of humanlike behavior, emotions and mental processes in other species. People love apes that punch buttons on computer screens, elephants that paint pictures and parrots in possession of formidable vocabularies. These are staples not just of the animal-rights literature but of popular animal writing in general.
Nothing tugs at the anthropomorphic heartstrings, though, more strongly than accounts of compassion or altruism in the animal world. A spate of books by authors such as Steven M. Wise, Jeffrey Masson, Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal accordingly offer up examples of animals acting not just intelligently but virtuously. Dolphins lovingly tend sick comrades, elephants grieve over the death of relatives, and apes stage daring rescues of people, injured birds or other beings in distress. In the last category, virtually certain to make an appearance is Binti, a gorilla at a zoo outside of Chicago who became a "bona fide hero" (according to newspaper accounts) by saving a 3-year-old boy who had fallen into the gorilla enclosure; Binti picked the boy up gently and carried him to a door where paramedics waited.
Dale Peterson does not resist recycling the Binti story, either, in his meandering meditation on the moral sense in humans and other animals. Yet as Mr. Peterson—albeit a bit reluctantly— concedes, there is often less to such accounts than meets the eye. What appear on the surface to be instances of insight, reflection, empathy or higher purpose frequently turn out to be a fairly simple learned behavior, of a kind that every sentient species from humans to earthworms exhibits all the time.
In Binti's case, the gorilla did not (as her keepers have repeatedly pointed out, in vain) "rescue" the boy at all: He was in no immediate danger, and the other gorillas were quickly shooed out of the pen by zookeepers wielding high-pressure fire hoses. Moreover, it turns out that, prior to this incident, Binti had been systematically trained to carry a doll and bring it to her keepers. This was done because many zoo-reared gorillas fail to develop normal maternal instincts; the zookeepers wanted to be sure that her impending newborn would receive immediate care. Binti's feat was the equivalent of a dog playing fetch, and she might well have reacted very differently, even aggressively, had the boy not been knocked senseless by his fall.
The deeper problem, as Mr. Peterson more frankly acknowledges, is that it is the height of anthropomorphic absurdity to project human values and behaviors onto other species—and then to judge them by their similarity to us: "It's like dressing elephants in tutus," he writes. Nor is Mr. Peterson so enamored of the natural world that he is blind to the very disturbing things that animals can do. Along with a lot of too-familiar accounts of sexy bonobos, empathetic elephants and cooperative hyenas, he offers less often heard tales of the ugly truths that reign in the animal world. These include brutal infanticide in lions and horrific violence and cannibalism among chimpanzees. In one famous case, observed by Jane Goodall, a chimpanzee named Passion repeatedly kidnapped the babies of other mothers and, with the help of her own children, consumed them. […]
A "theory of mind" is what makes it even possible to formulate abstract notions, to imagine the future, to try out ideas before acting upon them, to reflect about our own conduct and to see things from another's viewpoint. Charles Darwin observed that such a capacity is indeed the sine qua non of moral thought: "A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving some and disapproving of others," he wrote in "The Descent of Man." (And, he continued: "The fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.")
Mick Hartley 
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