Are you saying you wouldn’t?

Of course I would, and I agree we humans are indeed exceptional among animals. Why does that mean our consciousness, cognition, emotion, and pain are more valuable?

We need a subject or observer to assign value right? I agree that our ability to understand (or doubt our understanding of) our suffering makes us interesting animals and it seems to separate us from almost every other animal on the planet. Where we diverge is that I don’t think a human’s ability to contemplate their suffering makes their suffering much more or less valuable than a dog’s, cow’s, or pig’s.

Most animals don’t even understand the passing of time beyond a few hours.

Any animal with a hippocampus probably has some time cells, which means they certainly have an intuitive understanding of time. Maybe cows lack the computational machinery to assign symbolic meaning to abstract shapes and use them to record the passage of time in an external machine, but I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually neuroscientists found a representation of much longer sequences of time in dogs, cats, cows, pigs, and other more complicated mammals. The experiments would be heinous and I think this sort of thing should only be probed noninvasively, if ever, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were representations of experiences that occurred over days and weeks in dolphin and elephant cortices. I think there have been experiments on food-storing birds that showed surprisingly long episodic memory.