Veronika has become the latest animal in the tool-using menagerie knocking down the straw man of human specialness and superiority. They conveniently ignore the steepening arc of man’s destructiveness, which has no parallel in nature, and which makes humans very different, but hardly special. With the domestication of fire more than a million years ago, ancient humans began to break the bonds of niche. Modern humans, emerging over 100,000 years ago, began to exploit their environments and spread to every continent except Antarctica. It is no coincidence that the only other animal capable of premeditated murder, and genocide, is man’s closest relative, the chimpanzee.