I remember watching a foxhunter on TV arguing it wasn't cruel because the fox wasn't intelligent and therefore couldn't feel emotions which is nonsense.
Things like fear and anger are instinctive.
Arguably it would be less cruel to hunt humans because they can rationalise things and think "actually I have a pretty good chance of surviving this".
My own (unscientifically proven, just-makes-sense) take on this is that all mammals feel emotions, even if only the basics of pleasure or fear/anger. Some mammals feel grief strong enough to mourn members of different species when they die (ie. cats and dogs in the same household mourning the other when they die, or elephants mourning humans they've come to know).
It's well-known that some dogs and cats can suffer from anxiety if their humans are absent for extended periods of time. Two of my cats were like that with me - Lightning when I spent 5 weeks in the hospital 20 years ago (she actually thought I'd died, based on her previous experience regarding other family members who died, whether human, feline, or canine); when I returned home she stared at me for a bit, then ran and hid. No, she didn't think I was a stranger; it was like she thought she was seeing a ghost. It took hours for her to come down and come over to me, like "you're really here?". She made sure to always stay near me after that, even the night she died.
And Maddy, when I spent two weeks in the hospital a couple of years ago... my housekeeping helper came over to feed her, clean the litterbox, and talk to her, but of course she couldn't stay long and it wasn't the same. Maddy sees her as the human who pushes the Big Loud Scary Thing around the apartment (the vacuum cleaner) and she has two Yorkshire terriers so she has their scent on her. When I got back, Maddy talked to me almost nonstop for half an hour, informing me that she wasn't happy I'd been gone so long, and that I was to never leave her again. Even when I just went to the lobby for the mail and came back, she'd be at the door, mewing at me, unhappy that I'd left. She
still does this sometimes. She stuck to me like glue for the first several months after I got back from the hospital. She's let up some on that now, but still spends a lot of the day in the same room, and would even come in the bathroom if I allowed that (I don't; I've told her that I give her as much privacy as I can with her litterbox, and expect the same in return).
BTW, don't anyone accuse me of anthropomorphizing; I know my cats a hell of a lot better than you do.
