Trying to ignore it has sure made asses out a lot of smart people:
The dawn of naturalism (the belief that nature is all there is) as science orthodoxy fostered a new conviction: if nature is all there is, then humans are just animals in nature, and reason and making moral choices are not unique and do not signify anything unique about humans (perhaps they are even illusions).
This intuition formed two branches of ideas. One branch recasts human activity in animal terms. That perspective has become obligatory in the sciences and has infiltrated popular culture, where hundreds of books like The Naked Ape (1967), Dinosaur Brains (1989), and The Ape That Understood the Universe (2018) have spread the new way of seeing ourselves.
The other branch recasts animal activity in human terms. That is, if human intelligence is an accidental outcropping of the animal world, a sufficiently diligent researcher may expect to find the same intelligence in many other animals. But, so the argument runs, we are too prejudiced to see it. It follows that, with some effort on our part by way of reparation, some animals can be taught to communicate with us as intellectual equals.
Denyse O’Leary, “Why Scientists Can’t Talk to the Animals” at Salvo 51
It didn’t work out so well for the animals that got roped in.
See also: The real reason why
only human beings speak. Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly. (Michael Egnor)