[betty boop]

Animals use reason. They learn language, they use tools, they hunt collectively.

You assert that animals "use" reason. Alternatively, one might say that they use "instinct" -- "progammed" into animals by the same Source that "programmed" man for reason.

That animals learn language is a completely unfounded canard. After all this time, I think we could expect to have some poetry out of the higher apes if that were the case.

Tool using behavior by animals appears to be of a rather low-level kind. There may be a crude type of learning involved; I don't know. But for the most part it seems to be the sort of thing that a parent animal transmits to its young by example, not by reasoning. As far as I know, there is no animal species which has yet managed to construct, say, an Eiffel Tower.

Pack hunting for certain species can be quite easily explained as an instinctive, and not a learned behavior.

I wonder which of us is spinning the more egregious "myth" here.

BTW, you seem to be using that term with a certain amount of disdain or contempt. Am I right about that?

[stanz]

The "myth" to which I was referring was Prometheus.
Just because the language, or tool use or skills acquired in hunting by animals is unrefined does not render it as lacking "reason." The use of language skills by chimpanzees and gorillas comes under the heading of learned behavior, not instinct. Again, it is the product of observation. Tool use by chimpanzees in the wild is TAUGHT to the young. It is not something that all chimps do instinctively.Our ancestors stayed alive using much the same behavior which countless generations thereafter adopted and shaped into a body of knowledge we call reason. We are not so much removed from our ancestors.