Can humans ever understand how animals think?

I work with people who think animals are "automata." Such a position is insane to me. We can't understand their valences but it's clear that evolution must've conserved much of what it is to be aware.

> We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present.

What about the first photosynthesizing microbes which triggered a mass extinction? Capturing light in carbon bonds was a mistake? Valorizing the "state of nature" is error.

Only some religions make you think that we are super special in nature. Also except for a few things in the brain, a lot of things are the same. Its even more mind blowing how much similarity exists even between species that diverged a long time ago.

> if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born a narwhal instead of a German philosopher, he would have been much better off, and given his intellectual influence on fascism, so would the world. By extension, the same is true of our whole species. “The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect,” Gregg writes. “We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.”

The general point is true, but to assume that Facism wouldn't have been all that it was without Nietzsche is wishful thinking.

>A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species