Are humans the most valuable organisms on the planet?

'The red sun of Desire and Decision, the two things one requires to make a live world, rose higher and higher...whiles upon a succession of balconies, a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of Past and future nights'

'To see what the eye has never seen, hear what the ear has never heard!'---Tertullian the Antinomian

Genesis is a fine enough confutation of the really ludicrous proposition which holds that Man and Beast are one and the same, but only if it is read as an Allegory of Sense-Perception rather than an Allegory of Transgression.

One has to learn to appreciate the Fruit of Knowledge not as an Ethical Artifact (alongside Augustine and Aquinas, just to keep with the A's), but as a Sensuous one. The subtil serpent (which is not Satan, but Eve's own Daemon) enjoins Eve to focus on the texture, color, and the fragrance of the Fruit of Perception, to consummate the Will to Godhead then and there: to be Overcome by (now synesthetically) the Fumes of that Fruit. Man does not outdo Beast because He thinks; he outdoes Beast because he Feels.

Consciousness of Time, consciousness of Image, consciousness of the 'Screen which is truth.' Human beings are both their own Spectators and their own Mirrors (the consciousness of one's own reflection, of one's 'his own,' is Lacan's primary distinction between human infants and those of apes).

For many of us, we feel as though all humans are created equally but often at times people, in my opinion, have a double standard for the philosophy that it does not apply to anything outside the human race. I take a much broader stance on the philosophy, that humans are not necessarily anything more divine or valuable than any other organism.

I came across this argument while debating with a pro-life advocate, just for the sake of doing so, and my question was, if you're pro-life, why do you feel it's okay to kill animals? And the response was that humans are regarded differently, they are inherently more valuable. This isn't an argument on pro-life, so lets not make it one. Back to the point...

What's your position? What makes humans more valuable just because we have thumbs and better critical thinking skills? Humans are capable of showing the same and sometimes even more emotion for a pet that has passed away. So at least we can't say that we have a striking affinity for our own race more than any other species, that's simply not true. So without the emotional tid bit out of the way, what's so compelling about us that makes us "valuable." We eat, excrete, breathe, have a way of communicating like any other organism. You could argue we're at the top of the food chain and that alone makes us valuable, well I'll tell you what, the dinosaurs were at the top too and they mysteriously fell off the chain, where was natural selection to recognize their value or superiority?