Is there any benefit to raw milk vs pasteurized milk?

[Creed of Heresy]

The thing is, though, how do we measure the "happiness" of "conscious" animals, and how do we measure their consciousness? Here, before I go any further, lemme ask, how do you procure your food? Or, where, if applicable?

[James2014]

The thing is, though, how do we measure the "happiness" of "conscious" animals, and how do we measure their consciousness? Here, before I go any further, lemme ask, how do you procure your food? Or, where, if applicable?

How can we measure consciousness? It is very difficult, but to start with if we accept that the ability to bind together sensory experiences is foundamental to consciousness, then we can measure episodic memory in an animal. By this I mean the ability of animals to remember the what where and when of an event. Usually in these experiments animals will be given a shock or a food reward in response to certain sound, but only in a cage with stripes on the wall, and only in the afternoon. The question then is will the animal be able to bind together their visual sense of place and time with the auditory association with the shock. Will they always respond to the sound with fear (eg. will the animal freeze) whenever they hear the sound, or only in a certain place at a certain time of day. Experiments show that mice do the latter.
They can therefore bind together sensory modalities to create a new representation of the world. They are therefore conscious

Now, how to measure happiness. The best way I have seen is to use cognitive biases. What one does is to first make an animal depressed for example by removing it from its young at an early age. One then teaches the animal to associate a high pitched sound with a food reward , and a low pitched sound with a shock. So for example the mouse hears a high pitched sound, it then has to press a button then receives some food. It hears a low pitched sound and it presses the button it receives a shock. Now obviously in the latter case its not going to want to press the button if it hears a low pitched sound, but what if sound is in pitch ambiguous and is somewhere between the high and low pitched sounds. If the animal is happy it will be optimistic, and press the button. How does the animal that is depressed behave ? Pessimistically! What we do to animals in farms can be far worse then just removing animals from their mothers, as indeed all calves are forcibly separated from their dairy cow mothers, so it stands to reason that they are not happy. Regardless they are conscious animals with their own desires and interests, so for me treating them like property is wrong.

As for what I eat, l am a vegan and try to eat as much fair trade food, with as little environmental impact as possible which I buy from shops