By the same token should we be able to mistreat humans who have impaired consciousness, like babies and Alzheimer's patients and people with mental retardation?

If not, then self-consciousness cannot be our criteria as to whether to treat something well or poorly.

Animals certainly can suffer, so if suffering is bad, wouldn't the suffering of animals be bad as well?

benjamin90 , What would you classify animals behaviorial instincts as?

as just reactions and reflects
hm
and they got no soul

An experiment was done by scientists in which starving macaques (a kind of monkey) were given access to a button which, if pressed, would deliver them some food. But the button would also cause another macaque (visible to the starving one) to get an electric shock.

It turns out that the starving macaques will not press the button to get food if another macaque gets shocked as a result.

As far as I can tell those macaques have plenty of soul -- and it's the scientists who don't have one.

Animal value and interpretation of thier cognition is something that I have thought about alot. I don't view myself as being endowed with any inherant right to exist above any other life, beyond my survival abilities.

There is no evidence that a humpback whale, or your pet dog, does not know it is alive, or that it is unable to appreciate its life, is there?

Causing suffering for pleasure or whim is masocistic and not a moraly healthy endevor. I'm a meat eater and I realize that animal factories are horid, but I subscribe to a 'eat and be eaten' food web of practical physical sustanance. So while I would like to see human sustinance shift more toward humane treatment of food stocks, I will and do cause sufering to animals for sustnance.

That being said, I think it is a great mistake to view humankind as somehow superior to animals because we percieve ouselves having a soul, and that they do not. What is the soul? How can we be so narcisistic to think we are above all other life? Yes, our cognitive function is superior (well maybe not mine:D), but I say superior cognition is simply our modis operendi. Can we see in the dark, can we fly, can we do what animals do? No (eccept for when we use technowlodgy to replicate what animals do naturally). So you can't do what they do and they cant do what we do, so what. Thinking is meerly our adaptation that enables us to fill the nitch. This higher thought is all the more reason that we should treat animals with respect. Restect thier lives, thier needs, and thier feelings.

Lower animals that don't have highly developed nervous systems probably dont feel pain the way we do, but higher mamals probably feel alot the way we do.

Belief in soul has religious meaning, and although I am atheist, I continue to derive value from the bible, so I will go to it in order to bring up something that may be relavant to this topic on a footing that relates to christians. After the flood God told Nhoa that he could eat the animals, but not thier blood (Gen 9).

If you react to something do you not feel a reaction, yes...therefore if you can feel a reaction you can feel your existence.

wow that's interesting ! Hey but I think the monkeys are the closest to the human beings in their way of living and intellect?Mybe they have developed some kind of family feeling and realised that they cant live well with the loss of a family member,maybe they have had that skill since when the human race'' separated from the monkeys , cause I think the humans had to build up such a function to continue with their evaluation and the monkeys could do that too but got stuck at a somewhat time later of their evaluation..hm..