Yeah I was thinking of that when reading the article. We really don't have any way to compare animals to humans, in terms of how deep their emotional awareness goes, as well as the detail of their conscious awareness. We have no way to know what their thoughts actually are... so we can try to understand their motivations with tests, obviously, but... it's not like we can know how it feels to be a monkey or how they experience life in the way we can explain the feeling of experiencing things... I think we can get fairly close, but we don't really know for sure the extent of the emotional pain, for example. We don't know how shallow or deep their consciousness really is. Intelligence is not the same as experiencing something... we can experience a great many things, but have very little ability to understand it.

I guess it is similar to a human being who is born with severely impaired intelligence. Just because they don't know what, why and how they're being caused pain for example, doesn't make that experience any less painful and torturous.

However, we don't really know if animals experience things the same way as us. There are animals that can lose entire body parts and still go on living, not really responding to the trauma the way a human being may respond .. so it wouldn't apear they are in so much pain that they go into shock like a human-being would. So I guess it does vary.

It's not just animal abuse in places like that . China is also known for black marketing organs illegally from humans !! :umm2:

You have no idea what's in an animals brain though, this is my point.

Yes exactly what I mean but put much better :laugh:

Well it's not thinking I have to be up for work at 7 am tomorrow that's for sure, and it don't organise other animals to go and fly to another country to hunt a animal and put its head on a wall.

Obviously not as they're not humans, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about though? I don't believe I said "animals are humans really" anywhere in the thread

One thing's for sure, when the ocean is filled with plastic and there's no more room left on land because we've reproduced and reproduced and we can lo longer feed everyone, there will be someone left saying that humans are more important than animals and it's okay for them to be tortured and killed it's in the best interests of humans.

It's not really about being "more important" it's self preservation of our own species which it seems most animals have, I would imagine most animals think they're the most important ones, surely that's an inbuilt kind of instinct and the reason for reproduction?

Yeah, human beings have evolved to craft elaborate "story lines" for our motivations and interactions with the world around us. It's how we relate and communicate emotionally with the world around... though some things can be be distilled down to instinct, self-preservation, even though we "prettify" our motivations sometimes... the epic story of a passionate love at first sight ending in a night in the city... actually just the emotionally lubricated version of getting their rocks off. :laugh:

Animal instinct doesn't get watered down to the PG-13 version as far as we are aware.

Yeah pretty much [emoji23]