I think anyone who has worked on the topic or had any experience with animals knows that, to varying degrees, animals can be happy or sad/distressed. Most people simply don't know about or would rather ignore the realities of industrial meat production.
I don’t disagree with you, but to the parents point, there’s a pretty long philosophical -> scientific history which held that animals didn’t have emotions
Is there? My understanding is that the widely held belief was that they didn't have fine grained emotions that were comparable to our own. So far this research doesn't change that, but might lay the ground work for exploring that further.
There is definitely a long history of thinking of humans as something separate from animals. We tend to define intelligence and sentience by the traits humans are showing and only slowly it becomes mainstream to realize that animals also can have complex behaviors and communication, not in the human way but still complex.
Descartes described animals as being basically machines without sensation, and I recall many college debates with a Kantian prof who towed a similar line (probs rhetorically, defending the text). More examples of this probably exist, the extent to which there were widely held beliefs pro or against I’m unsure. I don’t mean to be hand wavy maliciously, I just have distinct memories of some of these zany ideas from an almost degree in modern Phil
