Animal Intelligence

Animal rights and animal intelligence are indeed somewhat related subjects, and the extent to which an animal is regarded as undeserving of being trivialized is often tied to how intelligent it is perceived to be.  Concerns that animal exploitation harms intelligent species are among the more philosophically serious objections to how some animals are treated by modern civilization.  Still, a creature does not need to have human-level intelligence in order to deserve to not be treated in an uncaring, cruel manner.

It is ultimately impossible to see an animal's inner thoughts by merely looking at its behaviors, for the phenomenology of a mind can only be known by direct experience (that is, if it is one's own mind) or by telepathy, a psychic window into other minds.  This does not undermine evidence for animal rights, however, for the same reason that the inability to know if other human minds exist does not undermine the evidence for human rights.  Even so, there are still differences in the evidences for human intelligence and animal intelligence.

With a mute person, one can at least know that the mute is, by all outward appearances, human, and that there is thus evidence that he or she may very well have at least many of the cognitive functions that oneself has.  With an animal, there is seldom any indication of cognition that goes beyond processing sensory perceptions, reacting to prompts learned by humans, and coordinating behaviors with other members of its species.  Outward actions reveal varying degrees of seeming intelligence, but they cannot reveal anything more.

A given animal might very well be just as capable of grasping the abstract laws of logic to the same extent that humans are, but nothing short of telepathy could ever confirm or falsify this.  Animals do not communicate with humans in a verbal way that humans can understand, and yet outward behaviors cannot convey if an animal understands that logic provides absolute certainty, that its sensory perceptions may not correspond to the reality beyond them, and so on.

Of course, a sentient being does not need either the capacity for language or the maximum capacity for abstract reasoning to have moral rights, and thus an inability to prove just how similar the minds of animals and humans are does not establish that animals have no rights.  It only means that a human can prove to himself or herself that an animal might have a lower capacity for reasoning.  In either case, there is a Biblical obligation to not treat animals in a cruel manner [1], even when the disconnection between minds prevents the most direct analysis of animal intelligence.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/09/human-exceptionalism-and-biblical.html