Animal Super Heroes

Throughout childhood I developed a liking to various cartoons... a lot of them had fake, animated violence like DC Comics-type stories or Marvel...

Well, after looking back I had a realization that many of these super heroes in these books often infuse with an animal: Cat Woman, Spider Man, Bat Man, etc. (not literally fuse).

Additionally, there were different shows as well: Jungle Boy (infused with what looked like a monkey-like animal), Aqua Man (the fish-man), and more obviously...

So my over-arching question is: Why does American society (specifically, along with others as well) decide to create "power" or "super-power" out of human-animal infusion? 

What about these animals, these "lesser" species (how we would consider them intelligence-wise) causes us to believe that ultimate and unbeatable power comes from them?

FOR EXAMPLE:

Cat-Woman... so after gaining similar qualities of a cat this woman becomes more powerful

Spider-man... so after gaining similar qualities of a spider this man becomes super powerful

The list goes on, however, why is it that humans view these animals (ultimately) as lesser of a species, but more powerful than them?

Ideally (in my head), if somebody asked me "What would you fuse with in order to gain super powers?" I would answer a Greek God, an Indian God, a Roman God, any God.... Any Super-Human that I can think of that carries powerful, unrealistic abilities but still has the same mental capacity and cognition as I do.

Since our history shows a fusion with animals, I continue to assume that humans distinguish the useful skills and aspects of creatures other than ourselves. Such as a cat having balance or a spider being able to spin webs... If we believe that animals such as cats and spiders are powerful only because they have acquired skills humans cannot fathom to obtain, then maybe animals believe we are only powerful because we have acquired some skills they cannot fathom to obtain. So this posts leads me to this: are creatures on this Earth only valued upon what each specifically can bring to this world? Such as humans can talk, spiders can spin webs, birds can fly, and cats can balance. Even the Werewolf is seen as a mythical creature that, usually, obtains intangible amounts of power and speed. These distinguishable notes in comics and cartoons lets us question whether the creators meant to say: Humans would be even better if they got some useful skills from other Animals OR humans will always be better than all other animals and these (ones given to the hero) are the only useful skills out of these animals that matter. Believing these animals have minimal meaning or skills contributes to our issues with cruelty and more. Maybe we were taught to think that eating animals and doing testing on them was okay because of ideas like these that were abstractly given to us as children.