Lori Marino is a neuroscientist and adjunct professor of animal studies at New York University. She is also executive director of the Kimmela Center for Scholarship-Based Animal Advocacy and president of the Whale Sanctuary Project.

In recent weeks, Americans have stood up for Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer who was shot and killed by her owner, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, for failing to become the well-trained hunting dog she was supposed to be.

But few have done the same for the other animal that suffered the same fate at Noem’s hands that day — an unnamed goat that also lived on Noem’s property.

“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote of Cricket in her new memoir, “No Going Back.” Cricket was smiling in the passenger seat of her truck when she decided the time had come. When they got home, Noem took Cricket to a gravel pit and shot her. On the way back from dispatching the dog, Noem saw the family’s goat.

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“This goat had been a problem for years,” she wrote. He was nasty and mean. Her children were terrified of him. And he smelled bad.

Noem dragged the goat to the same pit in the ground where Cricket now lay and put a bullet in him, too. When he didn’t immediately die, she went back to her truck, reloaded and finished him off.

When the Guardian broke the story of Cricket last month, they included the goat’s story, too. But over time, many news outlets stopped mentioning him. Some never did at all.

Noem has faced a relentless wave of condemnation for killing her dog. Karl Rove wrote for the Wall Street Journal that “bragging about shooting her puppy” has dashed her hopes of being named Donald Trump’s running mate. It’s understandable why so many of us feel for Cricket. But why is it that our condemnation of Noem is limited to her killing a dog, while the goat’s fate is almost unnoticed?

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I have studied the minds of many species, including farmed animals and wildlife. Goats, along with many other species, share many of the same mental and emotional characteristics that we recognize in the animals we love the most: dogs and cats.

Research shows that goats have distinct personalities, like dogs and other intelligent animals, and they are able to “socially learn” from humans. They can perceive information about a task from watching humans just as well as dogs can.

My review of what we know from scientific studies about farmed animals shows that they are intelligent, cognitively and socially complex, and have the same emotional capacities as dogs. Cows, pigs, sheep and chickens care for their young and get excited when anticipating something good. They get depressed when expecting something bad. They are not very different psychologically from the animals with whom we share our homes.

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Importantly, farmed animals experience suffering. Just like our companion animals. Just like us.

The uncomfortable, inconvenient truth is that 9 out of 10 Americans are carnivorous and we support the institutionalized raising and killing of hundreds of millions of farm animals every day, including pigs, cows, chickens, sheep and, yes, goats. We are therefore biased and motivated to keep them in a special psychological category. It allows us to agree to their mass slaughter and avoid thinking too much about their lot in life. Indeed, the way Noem treated a single goat is but a drop in the bucket compared with the horrors that take place at factory farms. And few people nowadays are truly ignorant of these practices.

We humans are adept at constructing psychological defenses that justify ethically questionable behavior. We tell ourselves that farmed animals are devoid of feeling, awareness, intelligence and concern about their own quality of life. This kind of motivated reasoning diminishes the cognitive dissonance we would inevitably experience by recognizing their complex intelligence and awareness while also raising them in grim conditions and then killing and eating them. By hiding the truth from ourselves, we can enjoy our indulgences without being bothered by compunctions or challenges to our sense of self as decent and rational.

This is a good moment to take a look into the mirror that is the Noem story. And if we find ourselves troubled by what we see, then let’s reflect on how we all could be a bit more compassionate and consistent in our views of other animals.

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