Denial of Sentience in Animals

Thank you for your response. 

I agree on most of what you're saying, except two things:

There is good evidence for intelligent thought, including abstract, in various species of non-human animals

I can understand why you don't expect there to be any emotional sentience in plants, but rodents, come on! That is really counter-intuitive to me, to be honest. 
They are mammals and have a whole repertoire of emotional behavior. See, for example: 

Never had a pet rat, so no extensive experience. I just think that the lower mammals like rats and rabbits have less emotional sentience and are more instinct-driven machines than the higher mammals - there is something sentient going on in there, just not as much. The mammalian encephalization quotients seem to roughly bear this out, with approximately 0.4 for rats and rabbits, 1.17 for dogs, and over 7 for humans. Of course, the EQ calculation turns out to be somewhat oversimplified and controversial, but there still seems to be a valid rough correspondence between the EQ (ratio of the actual brain volume to the volume expected for its body size (usually bodysize**2/3) for mammals), and the observed intelligence.

It is interesting that the rough correspondence of measured encephalization quotients to observed intelligence levels over evolution is naturally expected from the physicalist materialist theory that mind = activity of brain neurons. It is not so directly expected with our interactionist dualist point of view, but it still can be done.