In the biological classification system, humans are rightly placed in the animal kingdom. Since the question appears under Science/Biology the answer is "yes." If the question was posed under Philosophy, Religion or Society, you might get different but correct or debatable responses.

I guess a definition of terms can help on this. When we talk of mankind or human beings, there are some qualities which we can easily observe to be different from other creatures. There are three main parts to man. There is the body, which includes the heart, brain, legs, etc. The body is a very noticable and physical thing. It has animal characteristics, being a carbon-oxygen "engine". Another part to man is the mind. This is not the brain, which is a physical thing. The mind is made up of recorded images or impressions of all past experiences along with an assortment of mechanisms, and it does computations designed to look at and resolve problems relating towards what could be benefitial. You can observe this easily: you see pictures of experiences in the past, you look at your own attitudes and computations, etc. The person who is "staring off into space" is looking at the stuff going on in the mind. The mind does not always work correctly (and the reasons why are another story), but this is commonly observable when one sees the irrational behavior or unwanted emotions or attitudes occur with an individual. We see ourselves and others often do crazy things or have weird responses that really don't fit the present situation. There is definitely something wrong with the mind, but the cause and source of the aberration is not directly observable...the results or effects (weird behavior) can be easily observed. The third part to a human being is the individual himself, the spirit, the soul, the life force, life-essence, ...whatever you want to call it. This is YOU. You are aware and aware that you are aware. It is you who looks at the mental pictures and computations of the mind and it is you who is aware that there is a body there. The spirit or individual looks and knows that it is looking. The spirit has other distinct qualities of its own. When the body dies, you no longer inhabit it. These are the three main components of a human. But there is a lot of confusion and misidentification between these three main components of man. Here are some examples: A person might say, "Where does my soul go when I die?" which is like saying "I am a body and there is this spiritual thing that is kind of seperate from me as a body and it will go off somewhere when I bite the dust." A person is not a body and a more proper statement might be "Where am I headed when this body gives-out?" Often we find this misidentification between the body and the spirit. And again misidentification between the mind and the spirit. You are not the pictures that you look at or view. When a person looks back at a memory of a first kiss or a bike ride, it is the individual (the soul, the awareness of awareness unit) that is looking. The mind is not looking at the pictures or computations with awareness of awareness, but rather you the spirit are doing the observation and aware of being aware. Unfortunately, the mind has some areas of aberration unknown to an individual. Computations which the individual is sure are correct actually end up aberrated. This makes it tough for an individual to differentiate and identify things. Consider this: If something is wrong with the mind, what kind of answers will it come up with in finding out what is wrong with the mind? That is the short of it. There is confusion about the differences between the body, mind, and spirit. All three interact with a human being. The body is easily discerned being a very physical thing. But man is not an animal. Man is a spiritual being with a mind and a body. All three of these need to be addressed when addressing the human condition. Unfortunately, some consider a human to be an animal. A human is not. A human is not just a piece of meat. In fact, the perceived consideration "being just a piece of meat" is something often protested by women in male/female relationships. This confusion that a human is an animal puts the path of many subjects on a narrow view. Psychiatry, in its animalistic view of man, often tries to "replace chemicals" in the brain through the corrupt mega-million drug market, or throw enough voltage to shake the heck out of a body, or 20 years ago cut out pieces of brain. That is nuts. In fact, psychiatry is the main culprit in propagating this animalistic perspective of man. Those seeking to "control" man can more easily accomplish it if man is considered to be an animal or of an animalistic nature. Man is not a rat nor a Pavlov dog nor a chemically induced organic machine. Psychiatry is a very unworkable technology full of false information which has covertly ingrained itself throughout our culture. It is certainly not a true science, despite that culturally accepted belief. Medicine also has had this narrow view in just treating the body as if a human is an animal, similar to the dissection table specimens. The narrow view of medicine in treating man as if man were only a body is its biggest failing. Witness the countless money-making drugs on the marketplace. The primary focus is to chemically alter the body or its functions. However, the source or cause may not be just a chemical off-balance supposedly remedied by a patented, highly profitable drug. A natural, non-patentable remedy doesn't have much economic incentive. The source of a body ailment may come from the mental or spiritual side of man. Or the source of an ailment could come from simply just putting the wrong things into the body (whether orally or through the skin or through the air). Of course, a body may have genetic or body type influences in itself. Fortunately, we are seeing more wholistic approaches now in trying to handle aberrations. The consideration that man is an animal also makes it easier to slaughter peoples like Hitler did. It is much easier to be inhumane to something considered a soulless animal. So, a human is not an animal. To the degree that this is recognized and accepted, mankind will become more itself and more enlightened. Here is just a little history about this shift to the idea that man is an animal. If you are willing to "look", then read on. First, just take a look at a point in history when a world view was changing. The first World War had just ended. It is the decade of the 1920's with "modernism" [Flapper girls, Picasso, dadaism, Einstein and also Quantum physics, Art deco, Jazz] Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin then Stalin were swiftly coming to power. There was American fear of the "new negro" with race riots, the Ku Klux Klan had about 2 million members in 1924 (very big in the north and both coasts). The "Red Scare" resulting from the new USSR and fear of foreign born citizens led to incredible injustices. The majority of city workers at that time were foreign born. In the 20's, these people were also popular: Madison Grant, Freud, Jung, and some other psychologists. Madison Grant Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the "racial history" of the world. This early racialist work expositing Nordic theory was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power in Germany, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant, "The book is my Bible". Grant also was an avid eugenicist, advocating the extermination of "undesirable" traits and "worthless race types" from the human gene pool. Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920's America. Grant advocated restricted immigration to the United States through limiting immigration from East Asia and Southern Europe; he also advocated efforts to purify the American population though selective breeding. He served as the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League from 1922 to his death. Acting as an expert on world racial data, Grant also provided doctored statistics for the Immigration Act of 1924 to set the quotas on immigrants from less-desirable countries. Even after passing the statute, Grant continued to be irked that even a smattering of non-Nordics were allowed to immigrate to the country each year. A quote from Grant “A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.” EUGENICS is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through social intervention. Proposed means of achieving these goals most commonly include prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, selective breeding, In vitro fertilisation, and genetic engineering. Critics argue that eugenics is a pseudoscience. Historically, eugenics has been used as a justification for coercive state-sponsored discrimination, and severe human rights violations, such as forced sterilization and even genocide. This practice of eugenics and sterilization in the US has continued very, very close to recent times in prisons and mental facilities. 1920’s: Controversies and publications in psychology over Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and Herman Rorschach (“inkblot” test). These fellows are popular in the 20’s. Ideas of other psychologists mixed with eugenics started to evolve and infiltrate as ideas into society. Freud, did bring home a point which was: “there is a part of the mind which affects a person adversely without the person being aware of exactly what it is that is affecting him.” Freud’s precept that ‘something unknown, hidden from view, adversely affects an individual’ is correct. But Freud (who liked his cocaine) digresses with an emphasis on sex and comes up with some weird ideas like “in love with your mother”. Freud saw the church as an enemy. Wilhelm Wundt had previously founded psychology in Germany prior to WWI. Ideas emanated from this school of thought which dehumanized man and viewed man as a soulless creature. This set the stage for later atrocities. Man was considered more of an animal, a beast without a spirit, that man did not have a higher consciousness. Man was considered a stimulus-response piece of meat. This made it more justifiable in the wholesale slaughter of peoples and “inferior races” as Hitler took control. Ivan Pavlov came out of this German school. [Pavlov is the guy who ‘rang the bell to make dogs salivate’. Man is an animal type approach.] In 1921, Lenin of the USSR gave Pavlov unlimited scope. From the infiltration of these dehumanizing ideas came many gross experiments at controlling people. It helped to “justify” man’s inhumanity to man in Stalin’s USSR. By the 50’s, the US was covertly using pain/drugs/hypnosis mind-control experiments for cold war military operations, ideas which had emanated from the earlier German and Russian concepts. From the inception of these early ideas came barbaric psychiatric practices such as electric shock treatments or prefrontal lobotomies (ice picks in the brain) or drugs. As recently as a few years ago, a Texas mental institution was administering strong, high-voltage electric shocks to a juvenile’s testicles “to prevent him from masturbating.” These insane psychiatric ideas have led to the development of LSD and Extacy. Currently, remnants of this false idea that man’s behavior is animalistic, all biological, is seen with the proliferation of psychiatric drugs in the marketplace – a billion dollar industry. Yet, even the FDA (which is often corrupted) discounts this biological/chemical aspect. The hoax of “mental disorders are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain” is just a rumor...even the FDA won’t approve that lie. A “chemical imbalance in the brain” is a psychological / drug marketplace rumor. ...and the subject psychology/ psychiatry is still today loaded with weird theories and odd-ball ideas and made-up illnesses which change like “fads” every decade or so. Psychiatry has no true axioms. Actually, the subject is lists of observations and studies and experiments; complex lists of advice; thousands of different people’s ideas or odd-ball theories which come and go as “fads”; and a huge financial and vested interest backing. It is politically and socially incorrect to speak against the subject of psychiatry even though it is a bunch of bunk.

An animal is a multicellular organism, with no cell wall around its cells, that can't "make" (harness is a better word!) energy for itself and can voluntarily and quickly move. Yes, biologically speaking humans ARE animals, no two ways about it.

We are multicellular, animate beings capable of sensation, who inspire oxygen and expire carbon dioxide, and take food into an internal cavity for digestion. So...yes. More precisely, we are in the kingdom animalia, phylum chordata, class mammalia, order primates, superfamily hominoidea, family hominidae, subfamily homininae, genus homo, species homo sapiens.

If we are animals, we are VERY different ones. We are the only animal kind who put our own kind into cages ( prisons ).

as science says we evolved from monkeys or gorillas

Yes. Only we are concsious of our existence and have minds that can workout things. Slightly more evolved animals, you could say, but animals nevertheless.

Yes in more ways than one..

We eat like animals; we drink like animals; we piss and shit like animals; we scratch ourselves like animals; when we are threatened we scream like animals; we sleep like animals; we form packs like animals; we are born like animals and die like animals. What else could we be?

Yep--the best animals.

Yes, ;0)