We humans think that we are the best beings on their planet. But we would, wouldn’t we? According to one of our favourite myths, Adam lost the lordship of creation when he was expelled from Eden. His descendants could lose it again. If we could look at our world objectively, we would see other species contending for top place.

One way of striving for impartiality is to reverse roles and see things from a more non-human point of view. From Pongo’s perspective in 101 Dalmatians, the humans in his household became his pets. The bull in the ring, fulfilling his nature in a fight to the death, defies the well-meaning human critics who would prefer to kill him ignominiously in an abattoir. The cabbage screams under the garden knife. A more radical way to evade our bigotry is to try to imagine mankind’s place in creation as a cosmic scrutineer might see it, beholding us from a distant planet without bias in our favour. More arrogant life-forms than ours would, of course, overturn our views on the relative importance of our human cultures and civilisations and question our conventional versions of our history. If endowed with hindsight as well as cosmic vision, they might also be able to look back over the history of our relationship with other species. They would then detect - and perhaps endorse - the modest place in creation which past civilisations assigned to man.

No one knows how or when we, human beings, got the idea that we were better than the rest of nature. Primitive wisdom deferred to other species bigger, stronger, tougher or faster than man. Animals who were enemies were treated with awe, those who were allies with admiration. The Mesolithic hunters who left a graveyard intact in the Baltic accepted their dogs as full members of society, burying them with the spoils due to prowess and, in some cases, with more signs of honour than are found in the graves of their men. Households such as mine, which have scatter- cushions embroidered “Animals are people, too”, have a long tradition behind them.

Until they began successfully to exploit the natural environment, people feared it. They appeased it with offerings. They mimed it in rites of zoomorphic dance. When they made artifacts and buildings, they paid trees and creatures the homage of imitation. Instead of assuming that people were made in the image of God, they fashioned their own gods to look like animals. When they affected the supreme arrogance of divine disguise, they did so in pelts and feathers, horns and beasts’ head-masks.

In the civilisation usually praised or blamed for inventing our notion of our own supremacy - those of the ancient Chinese, Indians, Greeks and Jews - the claim that man is monarch or steward of the planet cannot be traced back very far: not beyond a period well into the last millennium before the Christian era. Once established, it was not widely shared.

I remember seeing on Nat Geo ' the Egyptian civilisation clung to gods with the faces, for instance, of crocodiles and dogs. The civilisations of the Americas worshipped the parts of the environment they ate. The mutual sustenance of man and corn did not imply the superiority of the human partner. On the contrary, it was people who tended the cobs in a lowly rite of servitude, while the corn seemed to exercise the divine prerogative of self-immolation for its worshippers’ good. There is no practical inconsistency in the idea of a god who sacrificed himself to nourish his devotees: the God of Christians does it every day.

In most of the rest of the world, for most of the time, similar attitudes have prevailed. In collaboration with other parts of nature, people have thought of themselves as equal or inferior partners. Or, struggling for survival in hostile environments, they have eyed other species as equal or inferior competitors.

Until about 300 years ago in Western Europe, it was still common for animals to have legal rights practically on a par with humans. Rats that despoiled barns, grasshoppers that ravaged crops, swallows that defecated over shrines and dogs that bit people were tried in courts for their “crimes”, represented by counsel and, sometimes, acquitted.

In Wales and France, pilgrims visited the shrines of canonized dogs: there could be no more powerful demonstration of the moral equivalence of man and beast. Today’s animal rights activists are ultra-conservative revolutionaries who want to put the clock back hundreds of years.

Man’s claim to superiority has arisen gradually, but it has had powerful authorities on its side. It is made explicit in Genesis: “Every living thing that moves will be yours.” God says to Noah, “even the foliage of the plants, I give you everything”. The Stoics, too, taught that nature exists only to serve man’s needs. And to top it all is Renaissance humanism - the collective narcissism of an entire species - has made the doctrine part of the legacy of the modern world.

Today - in the West, at least - most think humans are God’s best shot or, in secular language, the climax of evolution. Even the liberators of veal calves are moved by compassionate condescension of inferior fellow creatures. Yet still, in other cultures, people believe in material angels and demons that, inseparable from nature, patronize or imperil mankind with their daunting powers.

The Japanese, with their traditional mental picture of nature teeming with gods, are surely more typical than we are. In Hindu tradition, we assign man top place as the last resort of reincarnations, human supremacy is only tentatively asserted. Non-human forms of life are reverently handled in a spirit similar to what we now call “deep ecology”: not just conserving the environment or refraining from irresponsible exploitation of it, but treating it as sacred.

While in college we were introduced to EM Forster’s A Passage to India, when the missionary conceded that monkeys could enjoy “their collateral share of bliss”, the Brahmins asked, “What about insects, oranges, crystals and mud?” Scientists who think life may have originated in a chemical accident ought not to blench at the inclusion of crystal.

Before we dismiss opinions so widely shared, we should look at the evidence for mankind’s supposed superiority and try a bit of disinterested self- criticism. Most of what is usually cited as evidence is claim-staking for a privileged place in the world. Much of the rest are mere outpourings of a human identity crisis: imperfectly convincing attempts to draw the line between man and other animals.

Aristotle thought people were elevated by their social habits, but an objective eye might see the predictable, collaborative politics of ants or bees as providing a better model than ours.

Man has often boasted of his unique ability to fashion tools: a student of planet Earth, from somewhere else in the universe, might see this only as evidence of unique physical defectiveness. It is true that only people prepare food before they eat it, except for one species of monkey that likes to wash nuts, but it would be unpardonably arrogant to make a virtue of our peculiarity.

We congratulate ourselves on the size of our brains, which is a good test, but only by our own standards. Some of us like to claim that humans are the only property-owning animal, but even if this were true - for tribes of monkeys defend their turf and dogs fight over bones - it would be a recommendation only from arguable ideological standpoints.

Cognition, higher consciousness, even perhaps conscience and soul are attributes we assign to ourselves in our desire for self-differentiation. We suppose that we alone have a notion of transcendence - but, like most of our claims to unique wisdom, this is the result of our inability to communicate with other species. It is like dismissing as dumb the people whose speech you cannot understand.

No one has yet taught a chimpanzee much human language. On the other hand, even the most dedicated human students have made only rudimentary progress in talking to gorillas. Experimenters are disappointed when the chimpanzees fail to respond to efforts to teach them sign-terms for abstract concepts. Gorillas, no doubt, suffer from frustrations of their own with human interlocutors.

The very attempt to distinguish ourselves from animals is a delusive form of self-flattery. The line has never been satisfactorily drawn. Tribes commonly have no word for “man” that includes members of other tribes. They refer to those excluded as “monkeys”.

Our biggest rivals for the scrutineers’ esteem will probably not be other animals. The consciousness from which we exempt the microbes may be discounted as ascribed, in a form or by a measurement unknown to us, to other species.

We may not have to wait the day of the triffids to be judged inferior to plants. [The triffid is a highly venomous fictional species of plant that appears to have limited intelligence and survival instincts. It is the titular antagonist from the 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and also later appears in Simon Clark's novel The Night of the Triffids, a sequel set 25 years later, in which the triffid evolves into a more threatening form.]

During our recorded history, we have helped to make some plants - especially wheat, maize and rice - among the most rapidly adapted and widely grown species in the planet. We think we have exploited them; but in measurable terms, they have done rather well out of us. From the viewpoint of the astral scrutineers, it will look as if they have cunningly manipulated mankind for their own propagation and distribution.

Species like these, with which we live in mutual dependence, may not be strong enough to survive us, but compared with many others - especially plants - we will be seen by the cosmic judges as fragile vessels, exceptionally prone to self-destruction.

The conservation movement has made us worry about the durability of the natural world, as if nature could not last without mollycoddling by us. Trees, lichens, weeds were here before us. They will be here after we are gone: what objective test could be more conclusive? A still imperfectly domesticated nature is waiting to take revenge.

A psalm of David.

 1 O LORD, our Lord,
       how majestic is your name in all the earth!
       You have set your glory
       above the heavens.

 2 From the lips of children and infants
       you have ordained praise
       because of your enemies,
       to silence the foe and the avenger.

 3 When I consider your heavens,
       the work of your fingers,
       the moon and the stars,
       which you have set in place,

 4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
       the son of man that you care for him?

 5 You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
       and crowned him with glory and honor.

 6 You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
       you put everything under his feet:

 7 all flocks and herds,
       and the beasts of the field,

 8 the birds of the air,
       and the fish of the sea,
       all that swim the paths of the seas.

 9 O LORD, our Lord,
       how majestic is your name in all the earth!

In conclusion

Created little lower than angels, the Sovereign of God has [unfortunately] given us ultimate significance!

The star-filled night sky seems to go on forever. Looking into it, we so easily imagine we are meaningless molecules in the midst of a vast universe. Each of us knows moments of feeling totally insignificant. This very human sentiment stands at the center of Psalm 8 - Who am I? What are human beings anyway? Of what earthly good are any of us?

Looking at the vast heavens, we see the panorama of God’s work and ask about the meaning of life in a very particular way. We don’t merely ask, “Who are we? ” but more specifically: “Who are we that you, O Lord, our Sovereign, Creator of all, are mindful of us, pay attention to us, even care for us? “

Psalm 8 doesn’t end with this gift. It also offers a challenge. When we lower our eyes from the heavens and look at the Earth, we see that our special status gives special responsibility. We are to have “dominion” over all the rest of God’s creation.

The call to dominion can be troubling. Some suggest we have permission to use the Earth as we please. We can trample it under our feet. The result of such thinking is apparent when we observe the destruction of entire species, polluted air, denuded forests and diminished streams.

Perhaps we should shy away from claims of dominion. Even if this means we would deny the power that God has given us to do good or ill. Though the Scripture invites us not to deny our status but to think deeply about the nature of our dominion, we are oblivious of the effect our actions have on the generations to come ' not only of our own race and the other creations around us but of the survival of the very planet we inhabit. As God’s royal representatives, should we not rule as God rules? and maybe we should brace ourselves for the day will definitely come - may be not in our life time but if you believe in re-birth and karma, you will be there - when we will go back to being simple single- cell creature. And maybe the next time around we might - just might - get the message and get it right!

After all with great power comes greater responsibility! Doesn't it?