The problem with anthropomorphising isn't that we ascribe emotions to other animals. It's that too often we imagine those emotions to be the same as ours. They aren't, and they can't be. Animals' sensory apparatus is different from ours, so their experience and their awareness of the world is different from ours.
Their self-awareness is also different, and varies from one lineage to another. Feeling pain isn't the same as knowing you are feeling pain. Even humans can train themselves not to know they are feeling pain. It's one of the methods of controlling pain.
Does that mean that animals lack emotional lives? Of course not. Their emotions are as complex as they can possibly be, and that fact is enough to force an ethical/moral choice on us: do we ignore their sentience, or do we accept and honour it, doing our best to treat them as fellow creatures? Keep in mind that animals kill animals, and that this killing is usually not nearly as humane as that which we inflict on the animals we eat.
Respect for other animals is not the same as treating them as fellow-humans. As far as we can tell, we have a more deliberative morality than other animals do. Since we have that gift, we must exercise it. The fact that we too often don't even deal with humans as we should doesn't diminish that moral imperative.
Nor does it change the inescapable fact that all lives will end. While we enjoy our lives, we should do our best to enrich the lives of all other sentient beings that we encounter.
Posted in NYT 2019-02-25 as comment to:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/books/review/frans-de-waal-mamas-last-hug.html
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