Inside the Minds of Animals - Jeffrey Kluger

I missed this August 2010 Times cover story (and interview on Charlie Rose):

Our dodge — a not unreasonable one — has always been that animals are ours to do with as we please simply because they don't suffer the way we do. They don't think, not in any meaningful way. They don't worry. They have no sense of the future or their own mortality. They may pair-bond, but they don't love. For all we know, they may not even be conscious. "The reason animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs," René Descartes once said, "but that they have no thoughts." For many people, the Bible offers the most powerful argument of all. Human beings were granted "dominion over the beasts of the field," and there the discussion can more or less stop.
But one by one, the berms we've built between ourselves and the beasts are being washed away. Humans are the only animals that use tools, we used to say. But what about the birds and apes that we now know do as well? Humans are the only ones who are empathic and generous, then. But what about the monkeys that practice charity and the elephants that mourn their dead? Humans are the only ones who experience joy and a knowledge of the future. But what about the U.K. study just last month showing that pigs raised in comfortable environments exhibit optimism, moving expectantly toward a new sound instead of retreating warily from it? And as for humans as the only beasts with language? Kanzi himself could tell you that's not true.

All of that is forcing us to look at animals in a new way. With his 1975 book Animal Liberation, bioethicist Peter Singer of Princeton University launched what became known as the animal-rights movement. The ability to suffer, he argued, is a great cross-species leveler, and we should not inflict pain on or cause fear in an animal that we wouldn't want to experience ourselves. This idea has never met with universal agreement, but new studies are giving it more legitimacy than ever. It's not enough to study an animal's brain, scientists now say; we need to know its mind.

Last year, Drea conducted a study of hyena cooperation, releasing pairs of them into a pen in which a pair of ropes dangled from an overhead platform. If the animals pulled the ropes in unison — and only in unison — the platform would spill out food. "The first pair walked into the pen and figured it out in less than two minutes," Drea says. "My jaw literally dropped."
Animal-liberationist Singer believes that such evidence of noble impulses among animals is a perfectly fine argument in defense of their right to live dignified lives, but it's not a necessary one. Indeed, one of his central premises is that to the extent that humans and animals can experience their worlds, they are equals. "Similar amounts of pain are equally bad," he says, "whether felt by a human or a mouse."
What's more, we're not going to quit using animals in other ways that benefit humans either — testing drugs, for example. But we could surely stop using them to test cosmetics, a practice the E.U. is also moving to ban. We could surely eat less meat and treat animals better before we convert them from creature to dinner. And we could rethink zoos, marine parks and other forms of animal entertainment.