Human life vs Animal life

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Banefull

With any viewpoint, we have to start somewhere. With your web of life view, you start on the premise that all things are equal whereas I start with certain attributes. If dolphins and gorillas were ever proven sentient, we would treat them accordingly. We are not simply picking qualities purely upon what seperates us.

Yes you do. That quality in this case is sentience. "We" chose it to seperate us from animals because it is something that from our experience does do that seperation. If dolphins were proven to be sentient by whatever means "we" desire to prove that, there would be other claims of seperation.
Civilized humans have a long history in defining what seperates humans from animals, what "makes us human". It used to be things like walking upright, using tools, recognizing oneself in a mirror, language, culture,... all of this once was considered to be what makes humans different from other mammals and thus defines us. It all got dismantled. Now what is left is a rather arbitrary and philosophical concept of sentience. It is not even easy to define sentience and certainly it is not easy to say whether or not other animals have something equivalent. We see the world in a combination of 3 colors, red, green and blue. Other animals have 2 colors or 4 colors or can see infrared. They look at the same world, but they see something different. Would we say that they are inferior because they have a different vision? Because they do not "see like we do"? Or because they do not "feel like we do"? I acknowledge of course that what we define as sentience is something that seems to be different in humans from other animals, but so does vision or the ability to breathe nitrate instead of oxygen. We are different from other animals as they are different from each other, but that does not in itself have a value assigned to it except the one of diversity. "We" assign a value to sentience (or more precisely to the form of sentience we understand as such) to give a reason why humans should be in charge, stewards, controllers, managers, dominators or rulers of Earth.

Animals cannot grasp abstract concepts such as inferiority.

Hmm - does a lion not know that he is superior to his prey in some aspects? Or that some of the game animals are inferior to others? Maybe the animals do not think in it abstractly, but they have an intuitive knowledge. Who is to say that abstract knowledge is in any way "better" than intuitive knowledge?

What makes the world before humans "interfered" the ideal paradigm? From a mechanistic viewpoint, everything is trying to be on the top.

Well, I do not agree with a mechanistic world view in general, but even under that assumption - what do you define in that context as being "on the top"? A predatory food chain? There is not really that much of a hierarchy as humans understand it in that either. A deer (as an individual or as a species) does not strive to become a predator, it does not "try to be on the top". And all elements of a "food chain" are in fact part of a web more than a chain. For example salmon - they are near the top of the food chain in the ocean, eat smaller fish who eat even smaller fish who eat zooplankton who eat phytoplankton. The salmon then swim upstream where they are caught by bears and birds, their remains and the excrements of these birds are then literally feeding the forests there - the trees and plants. I think the concept of seeing this as a hierarchy is artificial and a reflection of the desire of humans who live in a hierarchy to find this form of organization as a fundamental principle in nature - to justify a form of organization they themselves are not good in dealing with. By rationalizing it as a principle of nature, their unrest is calmed by the impression that that state of being is "natural".
What makes humans (or more precisely humans in industrial civilization) different from other animals is that they invent linear realtionships. That they can take but not give back. This is true for a lot of the things humans consume. It ends up as waste in sealed landfills, is burned or shoved underground or recycled for human use. Some of the things are turned into toxic products that are then given back to the web of life. Instead of nurturing other animals and plants in that web, civilized humans all to often take without giving back or give back something that cannot be used again with value.
And this is what makes 'the world before [civilized] humans "interfered" the ideal paradigm' - the absence of true waste - of the creation of something that cannot be consumed by others or only be processed at a cost. Like styrofoam, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, plastics, CFCs.

We are not the only creatures whose existence has caused massive extinctions. In the Precambrian explosion, the evolution of eye sight in predators resulted in many species going extinct. You should also note that the amount of biomass on the Earth has hardly been affected by our existence and activity.

For the latter I'd like to have a reference, as I do not really believe that to be so. Deforestation and increasing desertification certainly reduced biomass. Catching enough fish to deplete many fish species to less than 10% in number certainly does not keep biomass equal. Certainly other creatures caused extinctions, but not on the scale and in the timeframe civilization does. I am not firm in my knowledge on the example you put out here, but from what I know about evolutionary biology I would say that the slow development of eyesight slowly increased the pressure on prey animals, driving some of them to go extinct and develop into newer forms. Certainly during the End-Permian extinction, a class of simple bacteria resulted in the extinction of many species and caused a mass extinction following a change in conditions that favoured their growth (global warming followed by an all-tropical Earth with diminished oceanic circulation). But is that an excuse? If you argue with the sentience of human beings as their defining feature, should this sentient species not behave differently than these bacteria?