Only one animal is truly intelligent

Letters from Nigel Pike and Diane Cornelius stirred new controversy in the debate between vegetarians and meat-eaters and are begging for an answer.
Pike argues that the suffering of the Syrian people renders “anthropocentricity” (“an inclination to evaluate reality exclusively in terms of human values”) invalid as a worldview. It follows that mankind is merely another animal – and that we are therefore natural meat-eaters along with other animals. But wait: this idea disregards the evolutionary process that has made modern human beings very different from our cave-dwelling ancestors. Pike also unwittingly overturns his own theory by stating that humans are the greatest destroyer of nature, thus implying that we are in fact not an integral part of nature. (I would add, incidentally, that we are also nature’s greatest “repairer”.)
Cornelius states that animals have intelligence and do not live by instinct alone. She gives another example of why eating meat is not a natural given: If animals are intelligent, eating meat is akin to an act of cannibalism – not something that’s in vogue among civilised human beings.
I agree with Cornelius that animals have feelings and suffer pain via their nervous system, but this is not equivalent to having intelligence. In nature we do indeed see awesomely complex social structures like the anthill, but this doesn’t mean an ant is intelligent. Cornelius is welcome to confer intelligence upon a chimpanzee for its using a stick to catch termites, but you can’t compare a molehill with Mount Everest. Not only are there relatively few examples of this kind of “intelligence” in non-human nature, but the capacity for symbolic thinking is almost entirely lacking in the animal world.
Egon