Right. The point is we cannot know what something is thinking if we can't communicate with it, and the further our experience of reality is from the person/animal we are trying to communicate with, the harder it will be to understand how (or if) they think. No one thought cephalopods were intelligent until we put them in a lab setting and noticed that, like us, they can use tools and think through difficult problems. Yet people still eat live octopus, and boil lobsters alive, I guess because their experience is so remote to us, they evolved in such a radically different environment, that we intuitively perceive them as objects.
To the original poster and anyone who agrees that lobsters are "low on the consciousness totem pole" (paraphrasing): when a squirrel runs in front of you while driving, do you 1) flatten it without a second thought, 2) hit the brakes/swerve, or 3) honk your horn? I honk my horn because I see a sensate, intelligent being. It works every time.
Related question: if you put a naked human on a desert island with no supplies, nothing, and at the same time placed a squirrel on the same island, who would survive longer? My money is on the squirrel.