Well, it's reassuring that you believe animals are capable of suffering. As for anthropomorphising, it's simple common sense that they feel pain, and pain is not something that is pleasant. Saying animals don't suffer is something an abuser would say. Animals feel a full range of emotions just like humans do (I'm speaking of cats and dogs, as I'm most familiar with them).
I agree on all points. The idea that animals cannot feel pain or suffer has only been historical legitimation in order to exploit them utterly. you still see this today with many people believing that fish cannot feel pain, for example.
I'm not convinced suffering is tied to language (tho plenty of self-help books promoting affirmations and positive-self-talk would disagree)
We have plenty of words surrounding food and sex and certainly our culinary and erotic words/mental constructs are going to affect our experiences but ultimately our experiences of either are gonna activate the same circuitry as our mammalian cousins.
The main difference w humans re : suffering is our sense of future which can either deepen despair or give hope. I'd say even that isn't as unique as it might seem on the surface, even dogs can acquire learned helplessness and understand routine and experience anticipation (granted they can't anticipate something months away but getting psyched about their owner putting their shoes on, implying a walk on the way, is probably lightning up their brain similarly as us daydreaming about a beach trip w friends next weekend)
Language I don't think is a prerequisite for suffering, that far I agree. Though I would argue that language ultimately determines one's thinking to a meaningful degree. In turn that'd mean other animals probably suffer in a different way than we do, I would extent the same to earlier hominids.
I wholly agree with suffering being tied to a sense of future, in fact as I wrote earlier to
@Birdjaguar I believe a sense of time and existing throughout time is a necessity for suffering.
When I'm away for more than 24 hours my cat very clearly says "Wtf man, where were you? Now lie down so I can cuddle/occasionally mwao/yell at you more"
The linguists can go stuff themselves. Cats and dogs have a language that includes vocalizations, gestures, muscle movements, and so on. Each one means something that is crystal-clear to others of their species, but humans are finally beginning to learn and understand them. Of course we can't accurately reproduce them ourselves, as we don't have the same anatomy. But after over 50 years of interacting with various pets of my own and other cats and dogs, I've got a fairly good handle on interpreting what their vocalizations and movements mean.
It's people who don't take the trouble to learn about vocalizations and body language who have some really bizarre ideas of what it means when a cat says or does something, and as a consequence may say or act inappropriately so the cat really does get scared or defensive.
animals and humans can definitely communicate in a meaningful way, that much is for sure. even further, animals
can make use of our language, as has been displayed by various primates constructing sentences with the help of human training and a computer. what is weird though is that while primates are capable of abstraction, mental representations, of issuing warning calls and solving conflicts, they never (as far as we know) go beyond the "words" (not exactly accurate) and sentences already established. this is analoguous to how many animals use tools. for humans, our infants are capable of neither language nor tool use and learn these key skills through mimesis. with animals those skills of using tools or communication are often inherent, not learned.
whether or not animals truly speak a language is in the end semantics. the way bees communicate through dancing and ants through pheromones is infinitely more interesting than human language if you ask me. but the main components of a language are still missing. from a paper I was reading:
We suggest that the communication of nonhuman animals lacks three features that are basic to the earliest speech of young children: a rudimentary theory of mind [note: TOM is different from mental representations], the ability to generate new words, and syntax. We suggest that animals’ lack of a theory of mind is the most fundamental and is causally related to the other two.
I don't know if the TOM question has been resolved in any interesting way, the paper is quite old. If anyone is interested:
https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/Cheney98.pdf . Certainly recent studies have had different results pertaining TOM in animals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals , but I think the question is still unresolved. It's a really interesting one to ponder: Ravens adjust their caching behaviour according to whether they have been watched and who was watching them. Rhesus macaques selectively steal grapes from humans who are incapable of seeing the grape compared to humans who can see the grape. (all examples from wiki)
of course one might argue that by defining language in purely human terms, like words and syntax, we automatically exclude non-human animals. that is a fair point, though there are also many ways in which humans developed very similiar to other mammals, so to me it seems plausible that e.g. primates could develop a language with words and syntax like ours, they just never had the right environment, nor selective pressure for that.
