VERY interesting thoughts gropegrope. I like your style. Chimps certainly do have a sense of higher and lower animals. In the infamous sign language experiments, the animals were raised like human beings and identified themselves as such. (when shown pictures of apes and humans and asked to point to themselves they would invariably select the human) When one of these animals was sent to a ‘sanctuary’ (although it sounded more like a hell hole) she was accompanied by her carer. She’d never encountered other chimpanzees before. He signed, “What they?” She replied, “Black bugs.”