Gee, you are lucky, where I walk most often, a nice country road, I have to tread carefully so as to avoid the bodies of the poor animals killed by our cars. We are now the top predator of so many species - I'm not sure if it's a curse or a blessing that we leave their bodies to the scavengers.

Poor bird - but you moved it's body to where other life forms can more easily use it and turn it into more life.

It's funny how the brain and mind work associatively, as you described - you were thinking thoughts (thoughts of animal competition) mediated by chemicals from your midbrain and brainstem, chemicals that help us navigate and succeed in the competitions in the groups and herds of other humans - and when you see something to reminds you of death, the brain and mind automatically associates the two.

And we all automatically - automagically? - do that kind of thing all the time. Huge areas of our brains are devoted to associative computing, because thats what works best for living in the close-up REAL here on the surface of this planet. Crazy stuff - the magical animal mind that underlies all our claims of human exceptionalism.

Don't you think humans are exceptional?   For example, do birds have anything remotely like an anti-bullying program in their schools? 

We are exceptional in being fascinatingly big-brained animals with the capacity to model out our existence and the tools of abstraction, that is, we are animals with exceptional traits.

The exceptionalism I was talking about is the mental model of human exceptionalism that forgets we are animals and part of a biosphere - that models us as non-animal, a special kind of thing, a kind of psuedo-angel.

Anti-bullying isn't that good of an example - because bird parents and human parents are both just acting to preseve their genelines and insure their progeny a future territory. A bird goes out and physically attacks a competitor bird, while a human verbally and legally attacks a competitor human. Very similar behaviors, very similar goals, but differing levels of abstraction.

(That bird you found might have died protecting it's gene line by bullying from competitor birds. Have you watched bird fights? They often forget what they are doing and do things like fly into windows or into the slipstream of cars, and get killed, because they are so consumed in the intraspecies wars.)

And the fact that antibully programs are necessary tell us something about which parts of the brain have primacy - the animal instinct to attack the weaker members of the group to establish pecking order and herd status is the force that makes antibullying training exist in the first place. And the tolerance for bullying - untill someone is actually killed by the herd behaviors - reveals how we all unconsciously embrace the animal laws that secretly dominate how we think and feel.

Hence, your ruminations about your own personal bully. ;-}

I still think  we're quantitatively different from all other life forms.     What about Project Runway and the bathtub races that they have every year in Millard Filmore's home town in honor of the indoor plumbing he installed in the White House? Or Guys and Dolls? I could go on! But I won't.  Doesn't mean we're not part of the biosphere.  And I'm not particularly religious, either,  this isn't about the verses in Genesis. Just makes sense to me when I look around.  (So not based much on science either)

Well, like I said, we've got these tools of abstraction, language, writing, numbers, counting, measureing, time, and stuff like that, and they are pretty special.

None of the examples you gave strike me as being super duper special, or characteristic of what makes human's the most significant and unusual life form on this planet - but maybe that's because I'm jaded about storytelling and celebration and pop culture. When I was younger I fancied becoming an anthropologist, and anthropology is still one of my passions. Anthropologists may have a jaded view of the stuff that anthros call "culture" - the things humans make, and the storys they tell. All humans make culture, and mostly we do it as unconsciously as ants build nests and farm aphids, it's just what we do, and most of the stories we tell are fibs at best and falsehoods in general.

I was thinking about this, and what's funny is that I think we may both be thinking of redemption.

I think humans are redeemed by seeing them as "just" the top predator. It explains why we are so mean to each other, why we are so blind, why we can't model the future.

And I get the impression you may be thinking humans are redeemed because they generate culture. The stories we tell create a kind of immortality of the mind. We are still retelling the stories of the Wounded Man, of Krishna and the Gopis, of Abraham and Issac, and of Coyote.

But, the human exceptionalism I was referring to is religious exceptionalism specifically. The problem being religious exceptionalism is so engrained in our culture that even if you are conscious of it, it's still all mixed in, and affects our minds and colors our worldview.

HI Bill, back from my wanderings out west.  I think I'm a few pay grades lower than you on this one!   I certainly could be affected by religious teaching, I'm a child of pre Vatican II Roman Catholicism, raised by pagan parents (not that they would ever have called themselves that, just seems like it in retrospect) who adopted superficially the customs of the conquerors. (Sicilian background)   But I don't think too much of guilt, one way or the other, and it seems neither do you.    Which in this case, puts us in good company with kapok trees and woolly bears, since they don't truck much with guilt either, far as I can tell.  So maybe you're right, it just seems that we're different, and because it seems so, we act as though we are.  We're not, but we don't care.