[Maru]

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.