St Francis preached to the birds. But have you ever considered how difficult that would be, even if birds could understand human speech?

Concepts like good and evil, conscience, sin, salvation, redemption, death, resurrection, love as we understand it, even faith, hope and charity would be incomprehensible to a completely innocent creature that has no knowledge of death, no idea of right and wrong, and lives its life almost totally in the present.

Everything we gained when "Adam and Eve ate the apple" separates us from all other life forms. That is a metaphor of course for the process of becoming human over many millennia.

But are we really any happier for it?