If elephants are smart enough to recognize an enemy, avoid it, and warn other elephants that have not seen this enemy first hand... do they qualify as people?
They certainly seem at least as smart as dolphins, and their trunks allow for a crude form of tool manipulation that dolphins lack. We humans define our personhood in terms not just of raw intelligence, but also by our ability to modify our environments, so...
> Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the non-human members of the Hominidae or great ape family: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.
I think they do require agency/respect/laws fitting of a properly conscious being though. Often people put humans on a pedestal, but in reality, we aren't special in regards to morality.
Without reason, I'd say there absolutely is something wrong with that. In fact, I'd argue there's no such thing as "human morality", only morality, which applies to humans (and other species). There are certainly some applications of moral law that only apply to humans, but that also applies to other species as well. Again, there's no rightful pedestal to put humans on.
> It derives quite naturally from us being the result of self-interested genes.
You're making an implicitly claim here that what results naturally from our DNA is morally right. You'll have plenty of people arguing that as well.
You can argue that all of these different categories have inherent moral worth and that moral worth is not dependent on the perspective of the person making the judgement about moral worth, but almost nobody actually behaves that way. And I would argue that the people who do behave that way are mostly confused.
I don't know if modifying the environment for your purposes is consideration for being a person, but as humans we are often poor at understanding intelligence, comprehension, and empathy when something doesn't speak our native tongue.
Humans?
Deforestation, strip-mining, dumping waste, drilling, war...
Just because we wrap all that up in an "economy" or "politics" doesn't make it non-destructive.