ppl really gotta wean themselves off the idea that evolution is progress and specifically that human cognition somehow represents a ‘more complete’ form of cognition than any other species’. i sincerely doubt that there has been a creature on this earth that, when free to act out its natural behaviors in comfortable environment, has not been 100 percent mentally engaged and fulfilled in its own way. those animals aren’t lacking some missing piece that makes their experience of their world somehow like, subpar and incomplete. its just profoundly different. like just because there may not be a lot ‘going on’ with a horseshoe crab through an anthropomorphic lense (which itself is a huge conjecture to make, we simply do not know and cannot easily speculate), doesn’t mean that what is ‘going on’ isn’t all-encompassing for the horsehoe crab itself.
this is as much aimed at people who get angry at animal researchers and behaviorists when they debunk overly-anthropomorphized takes on animal intelligence as it is at folks who think animals don’t think and feel at all. you’re not really exercising very comprehensive compassion for an animal if the only way you can imagine it being profound and worthwhile is when you can imagine that it sees the world exactly like you do.
