strokes Mint soothingly shhhh shhhh you’re a good gateway drug shhhh the bad man won’t hurt you.

I see where you’re coming from. On a social scale it’ll be more disruptive than the coming of Jesus or the Buddha. Yet ignorance has rarely yielded better results with time. If animal life is more intelligent than we let on, than not studying it is like not turning around to see the house fire because we’re looking at the pretty lights dancing on the grass.

Again, I have to go back to alien life. One of two things will happen. They will see us as animals with an above average level of communication: a parrot, and not deserving of the title sentience. Or, they will see how we treat life that does meet their definition of sentience, and we eat other beings that do, too. Or, the secret third thing where we’re ranked the same as the bacteria of our world.

We are in the position of those aliens making a decision about potentially sentient life. Now that we have a whiff of the embers, we should look at the fire to know how badly we’ve been burning it.

Okay, but picture a fox approaching a henhouse and hearing the word “danger. Large threat.” In no uncertain terms in language he fully comprehends. He doesn’t need to alert the dog to know a member of his kin that he cannot see knows something he doesn’t.

Imagine a line of buoys broadcasting and listening for migratory whale calls to properly time gaps in shipping lanes, able to say “loud scary thing soon” and warn pods.

Teaching dolphins to assist with garbage cleanup for food in special collection docks using words like “give junk for food.”

We’ve learned to communicate with a select few animals already. Dogs, for instance, have millenia of experience learning our body language and vice versa, and we still hold dominion over them while elevating them in our ranking of sentience over, say, insects. If any other being can form the same level of two-way communication, we should treat them with more respect.

Lastly, imagine if extraterrestrials used your line of reasoning. We would be very fortunate indeed if our difference in mental capacity and communication skills were that between a human and a whale or a gorilla.