Empathy is an emotion experienced by both humans and animals. I don't dispute that. But I don't believe that empathy requires intellectual awareness of the inner life of other creatures, or generalizing that to all animals as we are. Empathy is an emotional reaction, like rage at a perceived slight, and does not require thought.
The whole put oneself in other shoes process is buggy as hell, even for our species. We basically draw a flat copy with mirror neurons and run it on our own hardware. If too much divergence accumulates, the other becomes a idiot or deity depending on outcome.
Empathy often does require conscious thought from me, I'm curious if that makes me a sociopath. I have to intentionally imagine myself in the other person's situation to understand why they might be upset about something. For example when I heard about the student who was recently suspended for creating an N-word pass at school, I felt that those who were offended were just being overly sensitive. I only changed my mind after someone suggested imagining the same thing with a slur against my ethnicity. I just don't seem to empathize with people by default in most situations.
The best clinical instrument for 'measuring' sociopathy is the Hare PCL-R, which tries to estimate both a person's tendency to engage in hostile interpersonal behavior and their attachment to social norms - you could think of it as the difference between actively murdering people vs. callously watching them die without helping. One can have a high score on one part of the scale and not on the other. Obviously this is far short of being an exact science.
As for empathy, it might be an inherent quality but I'm inclined to think that it's like most other things, you can cultivate it with practice and it manifests different ways in different people.
> It is an emotional reaction, like rage at a perceived slight, and does not require thought.
Of course, we can't know this.
It seems reasonable to speculate that other animals don't subvocalise in human languages,[1] though that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't capable of thought.[2]
1. It also seems reasonable to me to believe that dogs (some dogs?) might be capable of understanding some human language beyond simple commands. I typically have more luck with my two 2yo Border Collie cross if I explain to them why we're doing a new thing. More research is needed. Please deposit funds in my offshore bank account.
2. We could debate what is meant by thought, I believe that would be a distraction
