God created some animals with "soulish" qualities of life…..in Hebrew they are referred to as “nephesh” or more specifically "nephesh chayyah". They can exhibit some moral qualities of humanity.
Man was given dominion over the earth and that includes animal life, but man can also foster emotional bonds with animals and animals can exhibit emotional connections both with man (who is imbued with the qualities of his creator) and within the animal's community. In that same sense animals - the "nephesh chayyah" - although not created equally with man, sources from the same creator and shares "soulish" qualities of the creator in that they can exercise some moral distinctions within their own communities of nephesh.
Despite that I wouldn’t design a system of morality for humanity based upon the code of monkeys or birds. I would appeal to a higher standard.
Still the nephesh chayyah although capable of exhibiting moral characteristics are not capable of violating God's law. They are not born with a proclivity to sin like man is. They were created to glorify their creator and to serve mankind in varying capacities.
Yes what they are describing is what we now know, the brain dictates these behaviours, we can see increasing size and connections across the animal kingdom of various brain regions. Humans and primates, humans in particular have a more developed pre frontal cortex, the executive function aspect of our brains. Which explanation is better? Mine can predict based on the brain the behaviours, habits etc of any animal, it explains the differences between species, what pathology would look like etc...
Animals should not serve mankind, we are animals, we look like monkey's how can anyone not clearly see a resemblance?
I like my explanation better, your's add's a whole other level of complexity not needed to explain animal behaviour. You are adding a hypercomplex, non verifiable creator to explain something that has a better explanation. It's like asking "why do things fall down" , why because god pulls them down, well actually it's something called gravity.