Non-human animals are mindless automatons who cannot feel pain nor suffer.

Please tell me that you are not comparing a dog to an amoeba. Clearly one of these life forms is more evolved than the other. Yes animals have a shorter range of memory, but that does not discount what they can achieve with that limited amount of memory. Further what you are talking about is their short term memory not their long term memory. Your dog will not remember precisely what happened three or four minutes ago, yet dogs are capable of remembering things quite remarkably over the long term. If you do not believe me, then try speaking to someone who makes a living training dogs. Also, your assumption that all animals are limited to a two minute memory is ridiculously flawed. You do realize that dogs do not represent even close to the most intelligent animals on the planet, don't you? The most intelligent animals on the planet are, primarily, primates. While humans also belong to this order, chimpanzees are also primates as are gorillas. Both of these species show remarkable intelligence even to the point of being able to create primitive tools. To refute your other point about animals simply moving towards prey, I would pose that humans are not so different. The primary concern of every life form is survival. Let us suppose that we have a person who is a very strict vegan and adamantly opposed to ever consuming animals or products made from animals. The very advanced reasoning which humans are capable of has allowed this person to reason, on a level of which animals are incapable, that consumption of animals presents some sort of ethical dilemma. This said, I can all but assure you that in the event this vegan was starving to death and an animal was all they could find to kill and eat, they would kill that animal and consume it for reasons of survival. This is because, like animals, humans have basic needs that must be met. As I have also already pointed out, there is significant evidence that animals are capable of becoming depressed. Were your assertion correct that animals are mindless and simply move towards food without any ability to think beyond that, why would the ever become depressed about anything? You are correct to believe that animals respond to stimulus just as plants and protists, but animals are capable of reasoning on a much higher level than either plants or protists. This is due to evolution and the fact that animals are much more evolved than are protists, though there may be evidence that plants have undergone as much evolution as animals. Believe it or not, even humans have very predictable responses to certain stimuli. If I hit you, it is very predictable that you will do one of two things. You will either run, flight, or hit me back, fight. While there are other possible outcomes to my hitting you, there is a good chance you will do one of those two things thereby displaying how simply our brains can react under certain circumstances. I notice that you have cited references, yet none of your references actually posit the point you are trying to make. If there is proof that researchers have determined that all animals are mindless input/output machines, as you pose, I would invite you to please reference that information. I doubt you can find it, though, at least not from a scholarly source.