Chimpanzees and other apes are wonderful animals, fully worthy of ethical treatment and protection. But they are not human beings. They are not 98% human; they are not even half human. They are 100% animals on their own terms. The desire to see animals as human is unbearably strong. But if we are going to consider closing down AIDS and hepatitis research and giving "human" rights to chimps, we had better be certain we are not just giving in to a natural but base less, anthropomorphic tendency without solid evidence to back us up. I am not disappointed that the attempts to find human-like consciousness in apes have failed. On the contrary, I find it profoundly exciting and liberating. We are surrounded on this planet not by things-like-people dressed in fur and feathers, but by myriad beings, each with its own unique psychology. As an animal psychologist, I can't think of any challenge more exciting than trying to understand animals in their own right and not just as dumber versions of ourselves.
Clive Wynne, Do Animals Think?, November 1999.
See also Humans in Funny Animal Suits by EY from July 2008.
This guy wants really badly to believe that animals aren't people, so he's likely biased.
His arguments are:
Recognizing one's reflection and self-awareness are poorly correlated; chimps can be trained to pass theory-of-mind tests but there's no evidence they're using theory of mind to do so. Plus there are humans who definitely are people who still have trouble with self-awareness and theory of mind. So those tests prove nothing.
Animals pay attention to different things from humans, so they don't have humanlike consciousness.
The latter is obviously a...
The Francis Crick Memorial Conference, held in Cambridge last month, has come up with the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (PDF).
tl;dr humans still aren't special, consciousness seems to arise in quite a variety of nervous systems and working out what it is is a problem in neurology.
We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from
experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the
neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with
the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that
humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-
human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also
possess these neurological substrates.”