But Orcas are just as intelligent, if not more, than Elephants. Some of the shit they do is scary. Most of it.
Their social capacity is also jaw-dropping, and their languages, and the fact that each pod has a slightly different language.
But your comments on the nature of how intelligence is measure in animals and what rights we should or should not provide is thought provoking. I'm mostly a vegetarian who prefers to hunt their own meat, but it's largely for personal reasons. I feel like there's a psychological importance for humans to kill their own food, if it's meat, and in losing that we've become a bit different than every human whose gone before us that was forced to kill to survive.
It's a part of our human nature so deeply ingrained, I can't see it atrophying without some psychological side effect. But I'm kind of strange so.
