However it emerges remains a mystery, but it’s possible that some configuration of them does not produce the consciousness affect.
For example, a million neurons is not enough to turn the lights on, but X amount is.
I don't find any of this intuitive, nor do I have answers to the ethical questions that follow (besides not eating animals, which I already don't). But I find it revealing how most people will fight tooth and nail to maintain that there is some magical threshold separating dead matter from precious, conscious life, without having given the topic much thought at all.
So that's why they are supposed to be kept, raised and slaughtered in relatively humane conditions. (Eg. free range, and painless death.)
Elephants might ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Death_ritua... ).
Of course, life in the wild is not pretty. Not many of the wild animals are apex predators in their respective territory, and thus their deaths are usually not peaceful, and being hunted, having close calls with death almost daily is a very integral part of their life, so they probably have an evolved way to deal with the psychological burden of this.
And that's probably what domestication changed.
[1] https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/orangutans-pl...
I like that idea, but I don't understand how natural selection would favour animals that are less stressed about predators. Are you implying that the gazelle actually enjoys the thrill as it is running away from the lion?
If dread, stress, trauma, shock, etc. leads to worse survival outcomes than a more calm basic set-point, then that's likely to emerge.
For example animals that form herds stick to the herd even if their family member is isolated from it by predators. Because they gain nothing by trying to somehow save the isolated member. (Because that would probably lead to more of them getting mauled to death.)
Sure, these animals are pretty defensive, but after a point they let it go. Do they suffer from it? Yeah, sure, they have very similar stress response, but they rarely (to my knowledge) are traumatized by these encounters. (Because they probably don't ponder, they don't think about what that encounter meant. It meant nothing for them, it's just life in the wild.)
For example Sapolsky spent years observing baboons and took a lot of blood samples, and measured cortisol levels. And those animals lead a very stressful life. ( https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707... ) But humans and primates are the exception probably. And probably the more cognition one can do the more things one can worry about.