It really astounds me, the arrogance with which people talk about animals not being conscious. How can they pretend to know what is in the mind of those animals? We <i>can</i> communicate with them. Maybe not as completely as we'd like, but they do get sad and happy.<p>Anytime someone says something about how stupid animals are, I just think <i>they</i> are stupid because they aren't even able to differentiate between what we <i>know</i> and what we <i>don't</i> know.<p>If you can't admit <i>I don't know</i>, then you really need to check yourself.
If animals were discovered to be nearly as intelligent as humans, would it still be ethical to eat them?<p>Farmers often talk about how stupid chickens are and they, therefore, have no problems eating them. But yet pigs are smarter than most dogs and we eat lots of pigs (but almost no dogs). Where does the line get drawn?
The fact that there remains a controversy over even the <i>possibility</i> of at least some animals having some form of consciousness, indicates how the evolutionary world-view still has ground to gain over the Judeo-Christian religious world-view.<p>Put another way, I'd wager that most users of this site are familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection. And if one accepted the basics of that theory, one would have to accept the possibility of animal consciousness, or take on the nearly untenable position that human consciousness sprang into existence from seemingly nowhere...