Aside from some of the other good responses in the thread (though I haven’t read them all), you may also still be a victim of the former (now mostly defunct) view of evolution as a “tree”, with bacteria and other single-celled organisms at the bottom, proceeding “upwards” toward more complexity, more mobility, more “whatever” (including intelligence) with apes and other primates occupying branches somewhat “below” mankind, and Man at the top of the tree. Does that sound familiar?
That’s a defunct view of evolution, because a better analogy is to a “bush”. Man is just one of the shoots in the bush, not necessarily “better” or “more evolved” than any other organism. (In fact, it might be fair to say that bacteria are the single biggest success in evolution, since they have been around since the beginning of time on the planet, and have followed multiple evolutionary paths to survive at extreme high and extreme low pressure; oxygen-rich and oxygen-starved environments; high heat and freezing cold, and all kinds of other environments that would be deadly to most other terrestrial organisms.)
Because of the advantages we have as a species, we have been able to spread far and wide and succeed (from a species standpoint) at the expense of many other species. This does not make us “better” than any other species, however.
Man, in this view, is not “more evolved” than other species, including bacteria, fungi, plants, whales, monkeys and apes, or dogs or cats. We just followed a different evolutionary path to get to where we exist today. For all we know – assuming we don’t kill its chances through any of the various means that we might do that – there may be another marine or amphibious animal that might evolve in ways that could (if allowed) rival mankind’s dominance of much of the planet’s surface. (And I don’t for a moment suppose that “mankind dominates” the surface of the planet. That honor still belongs to bacteria. And worms.)