As far as I am aware, intelligence is not the variable we care about with respect to ethical experimentation. Rather, consciousness. All humans are assumed eq

As far as I am aware, intelligence is not the variable we care about with respect to ethical experimentation. Rather, consciousness. All humans are assumed equally conscious, while clearly not equally intelligent. Similarly, we understand (at least mammalian) brain structure well enough to identify animals like cows to probably have relatively minimal conscious lived experience, even if they have ample processing power, i.e. "intelligence". So at least in examples from nature, there is no reason to believe that intelligence and conscious lived experience need be correlated meaningfully. So in your example, we would need some way to quantify the degree to which it's conscious, rather than intelligent.