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<i>If you can't communicate with them, how the hell do you know if you're so much better than them?</i>
Consciousness. It's a higher-level brain activity they just aren't capable of.
We tend to give animals human characteristics, because we are looking at them from our point of view. We want to think they can reason, chat with their buddies, etc. And certainly there are many things that they do routinely that we can't possibly comprehend.
But consciousness is really important. Pain and suffering is quite different for us, because we have the ability to ask "why?", the reflection on the memory of it, and the reason to rise above it.
That's not to say that we shouldn't reduce pain and suffering as much as possible. But to say that a steer "prefers" not to fulfill its destiny as a section of my hamburger is to miss the fact that the steer truly has no preference. (Similarly, your car doesn't care how hard you drive it. It has no opinion on the matter whatsoever.)
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