Humans are the only animals that . . .

I have had this desire to compile some kind of list of these anthropocentrisms (?) for awhile, and actually have been listing them in sharpie marker on that weird green graph paper I have laying around the studio. But one time I decided to look up the phrase "humans are the only animals that" and see what I got, and boy oh boy are there some absurd things in there. Anyway, here goes.

• "But humans are the only animals that symbolize water (as H20) and, critically, the only animals that magically empower water (by blessing it and making it holy)."
• Humans are the only animals that cook
• "Thus, Herzog believes that humans are the only animals that keep pets."
• "humans are the only animals that drink the breast milk of a different species. ...
• Scientists have suspected that humans are the only animals that can exactly keep rhythm with music. (not true)
• The only remaining behavorial definition would be that humans are the only animals that enslave each other.
• We are also the only animals who are aware we will one day we will die .. - aware of our own mortality
• HUMANS ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS THAT TRULY ALTER THEIR ENVIRONMENT AND MAKE THEMSELVES A COMPLETELY ARTIFICIAL LIVING SPACE.
• "Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs". - PJ O'Rourke.
• Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush. )??) who can say that?
• Humans are the only animals that can learn behaviors merely by observing others perform them. (?)
• Humans are the only animals that do not adapt to the environment, but rather adapt the environment to fit their needs
• Humans are the only animals that drink milk beyond infancy
• "... they are so specific they cannot be refuted, like "humans are the only animals that have invented computers". yeah, well, cows have four stomachs.) ..."
• Humans are the only animals that make pizza, or buy stocks, or wage war. This hardly makes us better, morally speaking, than other animals. ...
• Humans are the only animals that can create art
• Humans are the only animals that ingest calcium; in fact, we go to the store and buy what animals consider a waste product and will not eat:
• There is an urban legend that dolphins, bonobos, and humans are the only animals that have sex for pleasure; in actual fact, what distinguishes these three ...
• Because humans are the only animals that use other animals as tools.
• "In addition to speaking through lexigrams, Kanzi has another remarkable ability—he can blow up a balloon. While this may not seem like a groundbreaking development, Sue says it's a huge step. "Humans are said to be the only species that have control of their own breath," she says. "But Kanzi obviously has control of his own breath." On Kanzi on Oprah
• "Only humans have spindle cells." but later, we have proved that they are in dolphins, elephants, primates.
• "Only humans can imitate" they used to say. Only humans have "tradition" or pass things down (not true!)
• "Only humans are altruistic." (not really, maybe not even true for humans :))
• Face-to-face intercourse was long thought to be uniquely human
• female orgasm was thought to be uniquely human
• "some feminist scholars believe that bonding among women is uniquely human" but bonobos definitely appear to bond more than even human women do
• to imagine the future. "Professor Nicky Clayton FRS, of the University of Cambridge, will present evidence showing that a large-brained member of the crow family, the western scrub-jay, is able to plan for the long term future. In a study with scrub-jays, which naturally hide food caches for future, the birds learned to expect breakfast to be served only in one of two rooms, the breakfast room as opposed to hungry room. When given a novel opportunity to cache in the evening, the birds preferentially hid the food for tomorrow’s breakfast in the hungry room suggesting that they can indeed plan for the future."
  
• "Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them." 63 (Jonathan Safran Foer book I think) 
• I clearly forgot some old, obvious ones too:
• Humans are the only animals that use language (written? verbal? symbolic?)
• Humans are the only animals have have? understand? create? syntax
• Humans are the only animals that pass the mirror test
• Humans are the only animals that kill for reasons other than food. Sport? Fun?
• Humans are the only animals that have sex for fun (reasons other than reproduction?)
• Only humans suffer
• Only humans have feelings / feel pain
• Only humans have empathy
• Only humans have rights
• Only humans have rational thought
• Only humans have duties 
• “Humans are the only animals that draw. While showmen and hucksters have gotten elephants and chimpanzees to drag paintbrushes across paper and canvas, so far as we know the animals are simply manipulating materials and not making representations of things. As rare as the ability is in other species, drawing is almost universal among humans; it is as human a quality as speech and bipedal locomotion. Practically every human being draws at some point in childhood. As adults, we draw maps to direct people to our houses, diagram schemes for seating guests at a dinner party, sketch plans for the bookshelves we intend to build, make graphs of corporate performance.
• "Man is the only animal which can deal with almost any size of food, and even he has only been able to do this during the later part of his history." (Biologist named Elton said) . . . interesting point.
• "Humans are the only animals that cry emotional tears."

I think that the exploration of the specific ways in which the human species differs from other species can be very fruitful, but to lay claim to certain abilities at the exclusion of those abilties existing in other species seems to me to be outmoded, small-minded, and oversimplified. There are, of course, differences, and these differences are instructive. But probably not nearly as inststructive as people might infer based on a blanket statement like " humans are the only . . ." wahtever.