lives "vibrantly full of simple affects"

...Just as with Pascal’s famous wager concerning the existence of a God, we are surely less likely to partake in ethical travesties if we provisionally accept the mind-affirming position that animals do have emotional feelings rather than that they do not. And to understand the nature of animal feelings, as well as our own, we have to pursue neuroscientific work with a sense of cross-species sensitivity that was not a striking feature of 20th century behavioral research.

...At the very least, I think we must be gracious enough to grant other mammals primary-process consciousness—first-order phenomenological experiences that bring them back into the “circle of affect”—as most thinking people do both graciously and spontaneously as they interact with many other creatures. As Robert Burns related in his eight verse poem To a Mouse after he overturned a nest while plowing in November 1785:

Verse 2
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow mortal!

Verse 8
Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee
But och! I backward cast my e’e
On prospects drear
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see
I guess an’ fear

Although animals may not have the neocortical brain power to look forward and backward in time the way we do, they apparently live the moments of their lives as vibrantly full of simple affects, as we live with feelings having more cognitive depth.…

…from:
Consciousness and Cognition
Volume 14, Issue 1 , March 2005, Pages 30-80
Neurobiology of Animal Consciousness
“Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans”
by Jaak Panksepp