Being the most intelligent animal has not stopped the human being from also being the most stupid and evil animal, even more so as with such intelligence people have no excuse for being so very stupid as they are too often.
We seem to consider our own human species as intelligent. Yet many humans believe in politicians and irrational religious beliefs that make life miserable.
The human who does not use its intelligence has not only no advantage over other animals that may not have such intelligence but often causes immense disadvantage to everyone, like the man who does not read has no advantage over the illiterate.
There can be no worse insult than to be called a human. If a human is called a dog, for example, it would be highly flattering to the human while gravely insulting to the dog of course. There are reports of the human depleting itself away, maybe the best chance for the environment to survive.
There are of course also very clever people who can also be very stupid at the same time or at different times in different ways. This can apply to all of us. We can be surprised ourselves at how stupid or clever we can be from time to time.
If many people were not so stupid and lacking so much in sentience themselves, many people would understand better the sentience of other animals. Indeed it is always important for people to understand the character of each animal they have interactions with, not to expect from other animals what simply is not in their nature, not to expect animals to ape people in stupidity or intelligence. It is unfortunate how still in this day and age much ignorance has to be suffered by animals from human beings.
There are variances around the world. For example, in England it rains cats and dogs and in China they eat cats and dogs or indeed 'anything with four legs that is not a table or chair', as the late Duke of Edinburgh observed.
Indeed it should not be a competition for anyone as to who is the most clever or how much more clever one is than another person or animal. We should only compete with ourselves. That is common sense and maturity quite separate from a human being's age, as people of all ages can be both mature and immature.
Prejudices and assumptions and stereotypes are also dangerous and boring. It is far more fascinating for example to discover how amazingly much one can communicate without a single word with a cat for example. There we can discover our abilities to sense and understand things beyond our initial assumptions. We should always be open to new discoveries and not be stuck in what is perceived as established forever.
Like drawing accurately a human nose, for example, is about what it actually looks like rather than what we may perceive, it is a skill to sense what really is around us rather than ignorantly assuming what everything is.
Views may vary about whether or how people should treat various animals. It is of course ideal for an animal (including people of course) to be in as natural a habitat as possible but unnatural things are also not of course all bad, like brushing and flossing one's teeth if one wishes to retain them.
It is not necessarily wrong to domesticate animals also, not least the ones that are adaptable to domestication, as long as the animal is of course looked after properly with enough nourishment, good health and wellbeing and freedom to be its natural self without excessive control and restriction. The domesticated animal's welfare is of course also in the selfish interest of the human being even if many people seem to be too stupid and short-sighted to realise it.
As the more intelligent being, it is the responsibility of us human beings to ensure that we provide suitable circumstances for any domesticated animal in our care. If we cannot provide that, we should not be keeping animals.
Horses and hounds are some of the most adaptable animals. Cats tend to suit well indoors. Some animals are completely beyond domestication and should be respected as such while with horses and hounds, for example, people develop wonderful rapports.
Horse transport would help us to reduce our carbon footprint and would be fun at least in towns and other appropriate distances. People nowadays pay large sums of money to live in a mews but that is where horses should be.
It is inspiring that there is an increasing vegan movement motivated largely by the noble cause of respect for the welfare of animals. While it may be arguable whether humans are carnivorous or not, cats are said to be carnivorous, requiring a healthy diet accordingly. That in turn suggests that vegans could not have cats as pets as they presumably could not deny cats their carnivorous diet whatever they denied themselves. Animal welfare of the cat, for example, would seem to require the killing for food of other animals.
Indeed it is natural for various animals to hunt and kill others for food or even otherwise like a cat killing a mouse with no intention of eating it. The natural cruelty of a cat towards a mouse can be very uncomfortable for us, but it seems that we have to accept nature in some sense at least even in its seemingly evil forms.
It can be unpleasant to see a crow attacking the baby of a smaller bird but reassuring also when the smaller bird mother chases away even two crows to defend her baby. On the other hand, coots are notorious for brutally killing their own babies, almost as bad as (Bolshevik) revolutions devouring their own children (in the words of Jacques Mallet du Pan). It may be once again a debatable point, where it is not easy to say if there is one right answer or what that answer might be or even if anything can be done to change nature to eradicate evil. While humans have successfully and in a good way domesticated various animals, including some specimens of their own species, there are other species that are seemingly beyond complete domestication at least. One may simply have to learn to live with evil somehow.
One is tempted to think that humans hunting other animals is not wrong as such certainly as long as it is carried out in a responsible, respectable and sustainable way with minimising any suffering to any hunted animals or anyone else and, for example, not killing a mother animal with young children or leaving any animal injured or otherwise deprived of its natural habitat by any hunting activity. It is certainly preferable or a lesser evil than the industrial meat industry.
Even an animal circus may not be entirely bad. Horses for example are rather adaptable to perform while some other animals clearly are not and no excessive cruelty should be permitted to maintain an animal circus. To say the least, fox hunting is hardly worse than contemporary industrial agriculture producing meat that many or most people eat.
Le cavalier, c'est moi!
Horse racing is highly popular but recently criticism of the use of the whip seems to have increased, shadowing even concerns about injury and death of race horses. The whip really does excite people, in various ways! Most moderate people would agree that reasonable and proportionate use of the whip is acceptable and even necessary, with a margin of error about where exactly to strike the balance, the golden middle way, the golden whip of racing victory! The Palio horse race may be controversial but also wonderful, and many would feel within the golden middle way or an acceptable exception to it.
An otherwise fine global animal welfare organisation PETA doing much work to improve the welfare of animals may be however counter productive to its own cause, barking up the wrong tree, for example, by adopting a rather extreme position that all horse riding should stop on animal welfare grounds, for example, because the horse is presumed to have no capacity to consent to being ridden, a debatable point per se. That is arguably going just too far even if to an extent the motivation may be good. Still rather than opposing riders who mostly care for their horses, one might consider it a much greater priority to fight intense industrial agriculture and animal testing.
Religions and other ideologies should be (re)interpreted accordingly to minimise any suffering to any animals which is what most religions surely say already even if they are sadly ignored or misinterpreted often through non-religious prejudices. Surely the heavenly Lord gave humans brains to think.
While humans in certain religions have elevated themselves to imagines of God and demoted all other animals to their slaves, as far as the natural world is concerned, humans are little more than tiger or snake food.
People should also be at ease with nature and understand nature. It seems that some even young urban people are so estranged from nature that any insect repels them sometimes to the extent of hysterical panic. Yet even if one encounters a wasp that may sting, keeping calm only lessens the likelihood of getting stung and vice versa. We can train ourselves to be calm, and correct or adjust our attitudes accordingly through self reflection in all aspects of life. Insects, for example, are a part of nature like others with their role to play, for example, as food for lovely birds. While getting an insect in one's mouth is not exactly the most delightful experience, we put far worse things in our mouths, at least the insects are fresh and organic unlike most food sold in shops. While seeing insects on pastries in a café may not be appetising far worse things than insects pollute our food. Also we should see insects as something good showing that the extremist capitalists and upstart industrialists have not managed to destroy quite all wildlife yet at least.
Some aspects of nature may at first seem quite challenging to adjust a calm and tolerant attitude to. For example, pigs consider the fresh feces of a cow, as a delicacy, "oven-ready" effectively. Maybe that is why pork meat tastes so good. Apart from our self-centred attitude of disgust, we could simply see this as a healthy organic diet for the pig that seems to enjoy it even if it might not be our 'cup of tea'. Water kefir is in a sense fruit urine but rather tasty and indeed healthy probiotic drink for humans.
Cat hair is curious in that it does not seem to stay long on the cat but everywhere else, leaving the accompanying human with the additional benefit of wearing genuine cat fur and even ethically sourced with no cruelty.
Far more disgusting than anything nature produces is the so-called intense industrial agriculture. Once again the most intelligent animal has managed to outdo nature in evil.
No animal is more cruel than the human because no other animal is so knowingly cruel as the human who should know better. While many people also do much good, there is nothing more knowingly evil in the universe than a human - "The people that walk[ed] in darkness... " (Isaiah 9:2, KJV).
"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened." (Anatole France)
