animals and humans to day

For a very long time, there have been two main camps on animal behavior and animal cognition: exclusivists, who focus on the differences between animals and humans, and inclusivists, who concentrate on similarities between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. This long-running debate goes back millennia, with philosophers like Aristotle and Descartes arguing that humans are the only animals capable of higher-order cognition such as rational thought and language, and equally distinguished thinkers such as Voltaire, Charles Darwin, and David Hume arguing that it is self-evident “that beasts are en dow’d with thought and reason as well as man.”