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It's certainly natural, but that doesn't mean it's accurate. We developed psychological projection to help us assess the states of other humans, and even then it kind of sucks as a tool. I for one believe we have already met aliens, and coexisted with them for 200,000 years straight. There might be one in your living room right now.
Animism is natural. It's an outgrowth of our tendency to anthropomorphise everything, including natural phenomena. Is it immoral to offend the river spirits? You can't assert a harm you don't know exists.
I don't see how a species having intelligence and reasoning faculty means human morality suddenly becomes applicable to it though. Human empathy and morality is not universal and is a consequence of our specific evolutionary trajectory, and you can't reason yourself into your most base-level moral principles or your emotional reactions to things, they just are. There is no reason why every intelligent animal should share it. I'm almost certain you've heard of the orthogonality thesis before (given that you're here), quite obviously this does not just have to apply to AI; it can apply to any agent at all.
I've long spoken about presentism and the projection of current moral values onto the past when it comes to historical analysis. When it comes to animals who barely even share the most basic of cognitive characteristics with us, I reject any attempt to moralise whatsoever. How can you even begin to judge something as a moral violation when it is not clear that the supposed aggrieved party would even consider it as a violation either, morally or emotionally? The range of possible minds is likely vast beyond belief, and all of humanity exists in a very tiny corner of that possibility-space.
Are dogs aliens? I must admit I've never seen a wolf piloting a flying saucer, but my lab has sent many a normal saucer flying. Unfortunately, they were only domesticated between 20-40k years ago, not 200k.
Dogs sure, but also cats, fishes, turtles, snakes, anything people own as pets and that you could conceivably find in a living room. Some of them can barely be considered "domesticated" (I would say even something as pedestrian as cats actually fits this definition of "barely domesticated" and are basically one step away from being straight-up feral in the manner of their wild counterparts, see Gwern's post about cats here for a firehose of info about how dogs are indisputably superior to cats. Yes this is a fact). Then there's of course the fully wild animals we routinely coexist with like mice, rats or birds.
@Hoffmeister25 I wasn't talking about other humans or referring to them as aliens, though I get your takeaway - the wording is a bit vague and I could see how it could be interpreted that way in retrospect. That being said, "alien" is not too far distanced from how I see most people. Freudian slip maybe.
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I think @problem_redditor was referring to “other humans” as aliens.
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