Alasdair MacIntyre:

[I]f we fail to give [nonhuman animals] their due, we will also fail to understand adequately what the significance of the difference between human beings and some other intelligent species is. And this is Heidegger’s second failure. It is not just that he misdescribed nonhuman animals. It is also that in consequence he omitted to notice crucial aspects of Dasein, human existence. And his omissions are not unrelated to those of some of the analytic philosophers whom I have discussed.

What I already stressed then in respect of the relationship between human beliefs and the beliefs of some nonhuman animals was the extent to which the development of some distinctively human language-using powers and capacities extends and is founded upon animal powers and capacities shared with members of some other intelligent species. I now want to amplify this claim. It is not only that the same kind of exercise of the same kind of perceptual powers provides, guides, and corrects beliefs in the case of dolphins—and some other species—as in the case of humans, but that our whole initial bodily comportment towards the world is originally an animal comportment and that when, through having become language-users, we under the guidance of parents and others restructure that comportment, elaborate and in new ways correct our beliefs and redirect our activities, we never make ourselves independent of our animal nature and inheritance. Partly this is a matter of those aspects of our bodily condition that simply remain unchanged, of what remains constant through and after the social and cultural scheduling and ordering of our bodily functions: toilet training, developing what one’s culture regards as regular sleeping and eating habits, and learning what constitutes politeness and what rudeness by way of sneezing, spitting, burping, farting, and the like. And partly it is a matter of what is involved in our becoming able to reflect upon our overall comportment and our directedness towards the goods of our animal nature, and so in consequence to correct and redirect ourselves, our beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and actions. For it is of the first importance that what we thereby become are redirected and remade animals and not something else. Our second culturally formed language-using nature is a set of partial, but only partial, transformations of our first animal nature. We remain animal selves with animal identities. Heidegger’s omissions and exclusions from his account of nonhuman animals are such as to obscure this from view. I take it that it is no accident that on those later occasions when Heidegger wanted to stress the kinship between nonhuman and human animals rather than the extent of the difference between them, what he said was, even for Heidegger, enigmatic and cryptic. He had left himself with no way of saying what needed to be said. But more is at stake here than the criticism of Heidegger.