Who among us hasn’t stood at the glass in a zoo’s great ape exhibit and felt the disorienting recognition? The hands. The eyes. We watch them watching us. The line between “them” and “us” begins to blur.

And yet it seems that we work hard to quickly redraw that line thick and dark.

Humans have searched long and hard for a trait that secures our uniqueness. Tool use, we said. Then scientists observed chimpanzees fashioning sticks to fish for termites. Play. Language. Creativity. Imagination. Empathy. One by one, these candidates have wobbled under scrutiny. The thick, dark line refuses to hold.

A recent report described Veronika who demonstrated what researchers classify as genuine tool use by a cow. To meet the standard for tool use, a tool must become an extension of the body, allow the animal to accomplish something otherwise difficult, and be intentionally reoriented for different purposes. Across seventy trials, Veronika used a heavy deck brush to scratch herself, flipping it, shortening it, adjusting angles, even switching to the handle for sensitive areas.

Scientists believe they observe empathy in a variety of animals including chimpanzees, dolphins, rodents, and elephants. 

Language? Koko the gorilla reportedly used over 1,000 signs and understood far more spoken English. Dog lovers are probably not surprised to learn that dogs process words and tone using brain regions strikingly similar to our own. 

Even octopuses, invertebrates of all things, display problem-solving capacities and perhaps even forms of consciousness that unsettle our tidy hierarchies.

Most recently, Kanzi the bonobo—long known for lexigram communication and tool use—demonstrated imaginative play. In a make-believe tea party, he carefully tracked invisible juice and imaginary grapes. We watch with delight when our children develop imagination because imagination matters. Many of our highest cognitive acts—planning, moral reasoning, hope—depend on the ability to envision what is not yet visible. Yet imagination seems to be shared with non-human animals too.

If the line between human and non-human animals grows increasingly fuzzy, where does our insistence on human exceptionalism come from?

Christians, I think, are tempted to turn to Genesis 1:27: humans created in the image of God. Or to Hebrews 2, echoing the psalmist: “You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet.” 

These texts have often been read as boundary markers—a divine endorsement of hierarchy. Humans at the pinnacle. The rest of Creation subject to humans.

Read in context, perhaps these texts press us in a different direction. The image of God in Genesis is paired not with privilege but vocation: to till and keep, to name and nurture, to exercise dominion that mirrors God’s own life-giving, sacrificial care. Hebrews, too, ultimately points not to human triumph but to Christ—glory revealed in suffering love, dominion expressed through self-giving.

If there is a line, perhaps it is not a line of capacity but of calling.

Maybe what distinguishes us is not empathy, language, imagination, or tool use. Maybe what distinguishes humans is responsibility.

And how are we living up to this calling?

The climate is warming. We have polluted the air and water. Topsoil is eroding. We live in a time of devastating loss of biodiversity. Microplastics circulate in our bloodstreams and lodge in our brains. We are losing forests at an alarming rate. The ice caps are melting, and sea levels are rising. Bombs crater landscapes already fragile. The whole Creation trembles under the weight of human actions. 

Romans 8 offers an image of unity: “The whole Creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor.” The whole Creation. Together. The groaning is shared.

Perhaps that is the final blur in the line. We are not outside Creation looking down. We are within it, aching alongside it.

If the imago Dei means anything in a warming world, it cannot mean domination without accountability. It must mean representing God’s character within Creation—bearing God’s patience, restraint, mercy, and love.

The glass at the zoo does not separate us as much as we imagine. The eyes looking back at us are not merely curiosities. They are reminders.

Our difference may not lie in what we can do. It may lie in what we are called to do. And that line, unlike others, is thick and dark.

Header photo by Manuel Velasquez on Unsplash