It's such a CLEAR case of ethnocentricity, let alone species centricity. I'm reminded of Douglas Adams writing in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books, how humans thought they were better than dolphins because they had wars and jobs and skyscrapers and stuff, whereas all dolphins did was play around in the water--and dolphins thought they were better for the exact same reason. His joke recognizes the fallacy in that way of thinking! But this book, in contrast, is basically making the human part of the statement, but for serious.

I hear you so hard on the ESOL. Although I do ESOL tutoring, I've never had someone whose first language was oral only as a student. But Tikuna, the Amazonian language I'm learning, is an oral language that only had writing imposed upon it in the past century. The notion that Tikuna culture is somehow less-than fills me with fury.