To think that animals don’t feel pain or have emotions is some sort of WILLFUL lack of empathy. Actually, I think that animals provide a kind of smudgy mirror through which we can use view the non-rational parts of our own emotional life. We tend to rationalize our emotional responses, but since animals lack language or much rational ability, when their responses are similar to ours, we can assume that our responses are similary non-rational in origin. Of course animals emotional responses are often different, as they have evolved to provoke different behaviors.
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