I basically agree with most of what you've said here, but I'm not talking about humans in general, I'm talking about epistemic authorities. As I said, I think the intuition that leads people to the conclusion that animals think and feel is natural for most people, and I also think there was an era where scientific institutions by and large took the position that because intuition isn't rigorous and explainable, anything we have intuitively come to believe must be wrong. This contrarian bias shows up in more places than just our beliefs about non-human intelligence, too
The whole "intuition" thing is a hard push from historical, pre-scientific method and really you don't want to go there. Letting science be dictated by "intuition" is massively wrong, so while I agree that those involved in husbandry are going to be closer to the fact than those displaced, at the same time you cannot use intuition to validate truth.
Bear in mind that "intuition" can also be steeped in "because God says so, of course!"
Back to additional, historical schisms.
I recall being taught how "mankind" was "separate from animals". In the Christian bible, man was created in "god's image", separate and entirely outside of the scope of the rest of the world, and the life forms inhabiting it.
Book for Genesis and all that.
Anyhow the logic was that animals were one thing, and that "mankind" was NOT an animal. This made it easier for those steeped in a religious upbringing, but isolated from animal husbandry, to just mentally agree. I imagine, with a huff, 'But animals are NOT the same', and so on.
This also one of the reasons as to why evolution was so strongly fought. After all, "god said humans are separate from animals" and thus "we are not animals!! heresy!! no we did NOT come from animals!"
I honestly feel that we need more "this is how our ancestors thought" training in school, without the "let's present it in a poor light" or "good light" or any modification at all. There's so much work being done to re-factor historical fact into something palatable to the masses, and it just hurts all of us. We are nothing without understanding our own past.
We must always examine our culture with an eye to the past, and historical beliefs in the past, for us to truly understand why things are as they are now. And, why we believe what we believe now. Even with the majority of "Western" people somewhat detached from traditional religious upbringings, there is an immense cultural history and backload there, which permeates every aspect of our society.
I agree with you entirely that intuition constitutes fairly weak evidence of something being true, and isn't the sort of thing we should view as a source of data for empirical methods, unless we're studying the intuition itself as a cultural or cognitive phenomenon. Intuition can be hijacked, it can be dead wrong, and it can notice things but completely misunderstand their mechanism. Otherwise, why do science at all?
But the existence of an intuitive belief is also not good evidence against what that belief claims, either! I think scientists have in a few important situations found themselves encountering pushback where methodical empirical study comes to counter-intuitive conclusions, and the culture of science got itself trapped in a schizmogenesis feedback loop where results that sounded counterintuitive were seen as more scientifically sound merely on that basis (and, probably, because counterintuitive findings sound harder to do and thus more impressive). I think this is starting to course-correct, with terms like "boring science" (empirical tests which confirm an intuitive hypothesis) and "cultural evolution" (which some people use to prove too much, but the most solid form of the argument is basically that a commonly-held but illegible belief is something we should treat as a weak signal suggesting a potential truth rather than a negative one) becoming popular
Culture is an insidious force we should have tools for pushing back against, but it really throws the baby out with the bathwater to assume that no one who doesn't do rigorous methodological empiricism can come to know something, and that all such knowledge is necessarily backwards and stupid. Even a hypothetically perfect methodological empiricist who must justify all conclusions with legible evidence and repeatable methodology should treat an illegible belief as merely holding no evidentiary weight, not weight against that which is believed
