Steady, even pressure all over the body tends to soothe rather than alarm, much like swaddling soothes a newborn. Cattle squeezed suddenly by a metal holding device become calm instead of panicking. What looks frightening from outside can feel comforting to the one inside it.
Ordinary human brains run an interpreter that filters out detail and delivers a general picture, which leaves people blind to much of what is in front of them. Animals and some autistic people lack this filter and take in the raw details, sometimes all too clearly. That is a talent and a weakness at once: they catch what others miss but can struggle to see the big picture.
Animals are often frightened by small things people never register, such as a flapping object, a shadow or a sudden contrast, and handlers may traumatize animals for years without knowing it. Someone who notices detail the way animals do can list these triggers and remove them. Fixing the small scary details can matter more than any big redesign.
The single worst thing you can do to an animal emotionally is make it afraid, worse even than many kinds of physical discomfort. So the first test of how an animal is treated is whether it lives in fear. Beyond that, a decent life also needs something useful to do, not just low stress and a painless death.
Language is not required for consciousness or thought: animals think in pictures and sensory details rather than words. They also use emotions to think, make decisions and even anticipate the future. To understand them, study what they do, feel and notice on their own terms rather than measuring them against verbal human thinking.