Love to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our heads out of our collective asses with regards to the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals. I think there's a natural tendency for humans to anthropomorphize, to project human behaviors and motivations onto other animals, which can get pretty extreme and silly in some cases, like how we project this assumption onto non-living phenomena, like a rainstorm or machine learning model. However, I think in the case of animals, especially complex charismatic megafauna, and especially especially things like highly social mammals, it's actually a better assumption that their internal experience and motivations may resemble ours than this ridiculous contrarian backlash against it we got in the last few hundred years, where now we're supposed to treat "These tiny variations on what we are are somehow so fundamentally ontologically different that we should assume we can understand nothing about how they think, or whether they even do at all, without doing a zillion RCTs" (and this dovetails conveniently with immiserating them to an unheard-of degree at an unfathomable scale by modern industry). Similarly-shaped contrarianisms are unfortunately still much of the dominant culture of institutions, but it's nice that some of them are losing their grip