Anthropocentrism is a hell of a drug.
The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric, but a rejection of folklore as literal truth. While some are still attached to an anthropocentric worldview, that perspective seems dead among people who study animal behavior.
> scientific understanding of the nature of animals was based on folklore
Popular, pre- or proto- scientific understanding perhaps, but not scientific understanding per se.
> despite a couple centuries of assuming that animals are pure instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence that they are individuals with intelligence, memory, feelings, preferences and even language
These things are not mutually exclusive. The words "intelligence", "memory", "feelings", "preferences" and "language" can refer to purely automatic/mechanical processes, even when we're speaking in reference to humans. There's no real reason why we need non-mechanistic magic to explain the human experience. The two ideas are compatible: animals are conscious, and humans are "just" really complex machines. It's all the same stuff, viewed from different lenses.
> The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric
They were, and they still are. Folklore itself is for the most part very anthropocentric.
I suspect the attitude is the default / most primitive one, because any other attitude requires higher-order cognitive processes that can abstract one's own experiences (which is the only real input one has) with the behaviours of entities that appear to be very different from oneself. In other words, the capacity for empathy is a "positive feature", in the sense that it is absent by default.
The ability to make this kind of abstraction is a pretty sophisticated thing, and either requires time to evolve (as an instinct), and/or requires socialization/learning (as a partly or totally-intentional practice).
People don’t like it, just like many people don’t like animals being aware.
I had a fascinating theological discussion with a guy once. He was a farmer and he believed strongly that animals lack souls. I, on the other hand, believe that even amoeba have souls. I feel it’s just a condition of being a living thing while he felt that this was unique to humankind. Obviously, he has an interest emotionally in viewing animals as soulless. Easier to slaughter them that way.
