What is the point of separation between Homo sapiens sapiens and other animals?

[warty goblin]

Honesty also means looking at our potentials and realising that we alone are capable of willfully transforming our practice to accord with truth, compassion, and justice.

I never denied we had that potential. As I said though, potential unused is irrelevant to what is done, and what we are doing is not. Ergo I don't see any particular reason to celebrate.

Also, will you answer my question?

Are humans "special" and therefore not culpable for murdering cockroaches, or are they not special and therefore either culpable (if we extend human morality to all our "brothers and sisters") or not culpable (if we extend animal morality to humans)?

Sure, the answer is none of the above. I personally do not see humans as "special" in the sense of being things of a separate kind from animals. I'm an animal, a wolf is a different sort of animal. Morality is a something we use to circumscribe human behavior towards other humans and to some extent members of other species. This is I think deeply rooted in human biology as expressed through environment and circumstance. It is emphatically not a realization of some greater transcendental truth.

So if wolves had morality, it would necessarily be rooted in wolf biology as expressed through the current environment. Which means that wolf morality is under no guarantee to copy human morality, and may in fact be entirely incompatible with it. In which case I would argue that the moral thing to do - as a human - is to leave the wolves to their business as much as possible. One may obviously defend oneself if attacked by a wolf, but to attempt to remake wolves to conform to particular human standards fails to respect the human value of freedom.

In conclusion, whether it is morally wrong to kill a cockroach - or a wolf - is a human question. My thinking is that it is not immoral, since humans are animals, and animals kill each other all the time, and I see little reason to separate ourselves in this regard. Whether the wolf is right to kill an elk (or us) is a wolf question. We aren't wolves and should leave well enough alone. Since wolves appear to enthusiastically kill and eat a variety of species (including on occasion each other) I conclude that insofar as wolf morality is a thing, it is entirely compatible to tearing things apart and eating them.