There is no succinct way to explain everything wrong with the OP’s quote. (I am only listing one source for each claim below, but there are multiple sources easily accessible for each.)
Human beings are made of the same “stuff” as other animals, and especially other mammals. We share a considerable number of genes in common not only with other animals, but with all living things:
-- 15% with mustard grass (a plant)
-- 7% with various bacteria
-- 21% with a roundworm
-- 36% with a fruit fly
-- 85% - yes, eighty-five percent with Zebra Fish
-- Approximately 98% with a Chimpanzee
(Source: http://genetics.thetech.org/online-exhibits/genes-common)
Among the more intelligent animals other primates, elephants, dolphins, pigs, and so on we find a range of behaviours once thought to be uniquely human.
Great Apes are capable of communicating with human beings in an intelligible way through sign language and maybe even more so through body language.
Other animals communicate sophisticated ideas to one another, and to us, through smell, sight, hearing (e.g. warning vocalizations), posture, ground pounding (vibration), and so on.
PEOPLE in the wild who have crossed into territory occupied by certain animals learn really quickly which vocalizations and postures mean what when animals warn away intrusive human beings.
Traits Animals Have in Common with Humans a Short List
-- Animals, and especially primates, are capable of complex communication, some of which is intelligible to human beings when we teach them a method of communication
- sign language that allows them to express ideas without benefit of a larynx. (Source: http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/experience_bleu07.html)
-- Elephants not only mourn their dead, but it turns out they are willing and able to seek vengeance against human beings for the actions of poachers. (A simple online search brings up a great deal of data on this phenomenon.)
-- Bonobos have sex for fun. (Source: discovermagazine.com/1992/jun/13-whatslovegottodo56)
-- Bottle-nosed dolphins kill not merely over territory, over their young, or over mates; there’s evidence they kill for sport. (Source: https://www.quora.com/Which-organisms-other-than-humans-kill-for-fun)
Animals even share ideas that have no real impact on their survival.
A personal example: I had one cat alas he died at age 17 who enjoyed washing his head under a running tap. The other two cats we have then picked up the habit from him. (That information would not, as far as I know, confer any kind of survival advantage and yet one cat taught his preference to two others.)
Because our closest genetic relatives were physically incapable of the kind of speech we use, people have long erred and this, badly, to the detriment of wildlife around the world in believing our species is the only one capable of communicating complex ideas (as well as of feeling love, perhaps through pair-bonding; of feeling anger, hate, and fear; and of feeling both physical and emotional pain.)
The fact we are primates - we are mammals, we are animals - is not at all demeaning except among people whose hubris will not allow them to accept that human beings are not merely dispassionate onlookers recording the nature around us; rather, we an integral part of that nature.
We are animals. That is not merely opinion; it is fact beyond a doubt.
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EDITED TO ADD...
I have a high regard for the tools of critical thinking and for the scientific method. I nonetheless believe in a higher power - one with an interest in our tiny blue world. It occurs to me that even as persons were once but a tiny clump of cells within their mothers' bodies, so too was the entire known universe once something smaller than a grain of sand. (Fear not; I'm not mixing animal evolution with cosmic evolution - or at least not in the way some creationists do.)
Our universe, perhaps through independent and non-thinking processes, has a level of symmetry and grace that exists among the largest cosmic bodies and right down to the cells in our blood. I of course grant that "goddidit" is not even close to a sufficient answer when it comes to tackling whatever observations we cannot yet explain.
I do think, however, that there exists a Prime Mover (whether the math of universal creation requires such a being or not). I believe this on the strength of personal experience - a thing which cannot be tested or falsified, and so it's a thing I do not expect anyone else to accept as fact.
Critical thinking should be taught to children as young as possible, both at home and in the classroom. I don't care if it's a theist or an atheist that develops and champions such an important curriculum, but I do care that these lessons should be taught more than once and in a way that will not denigrate theists or religion.
A portion of the children taught to think critically will become atheists because that's where the data takes them. Others will become theists because that's where their own experience takes them. All should be on equal footing when it comes to their capacity to identify fallacious arguments, however; and all should be able to pinpoint and expose fallacies even while showing basic respect for the person making the bad argument.
