Reddit reviews The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201711/cows-science-shows-theyre-bright-and-emotional-individuals

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>Learning and Cognition: In this section, we learn that cows display the ability to rapidly learn different tasks, display long-term memory, extrapolate the location of a hidden moving object, discriminate complex stimuli, and discriminate humans from one another. The authors note, "Calves as well as adult cows show learned fear responses to humans who have previously handled them in a rough manner." Cows also display complex spatial memory and are able to discriminate among individual cows and recognize cow faces as different from the faces of other species. 
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>Emotions: A good deal of research has been done on the emotional lives of cows and we know that they experience a wide range of emotions. For example, they display fear and anxiety and the less eye white that is seen, the better they feel. When cow mothers are separated from their calves, as is done as they are being prepared for meals, there is an increase in the amount of eye white. Ears also are indicators of a cow's emotional state. Relaxed ear postures indicate cows are feeling okay. Cows also like to play, as do countless other nonhuman animals. And, they how decreased play when their well-being is compromised. One very important discovery is that when cows are stressed, such as after they're branded with a hot iron, they show a decrease in the ability to judge ambiguous stimuli, as do humans. For more discussion of the emotional lives of cows please see "The Cow's Nose Shows How They're Feeling About Life," "The Emotional Lives of Cows: Ears Tell Us They're Feeling OK," and links therein. 
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>Marino and Allen also report that cows display emotional contagion. They write, "A series of studies on a form of emotional contagion mediated by olfactory cues has shown that when cows are exposed to stressed conspecifics they too show pronounced stress responses, such as decreased feeding and increased cortisol release." I often stress that cows and other so-called "food animals" not only see family members, friends, and others being killed for food, they also smell and hear what's happening. It's also known that the presence of other cows can buffer the stress that cows feel on their way to market. This called "social buffering" and has been demonstrated in other nonhumans. Mothers and calves also show extreme distress when separated. This is not at all surprising but remains a common practice in the animal-food industry.
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>Personality: Cows, similar to numerous other nonhumans, display a full range of personalities including boldness, shyness, sociability and gregariousness, and being temperamental. Of course, these are not surprising results and people working with and studying cows have known this for a long time.
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>Social Complexity: Concerning this topic, Marino and Allen write that the social complexity hypothesis "suggests that the challenges encountered in the social environment place selective pressures on brain evolution" and "there should be a positive relationship between social complexity and individual intelligence across species." From a practical point of view, they note, "Bergman and Beehner (2015) propose a contemporary definition of social complexity that preserves the central role of cognition: "... social complexity should be measured as the number of differentiated relationships that members of a species have with conspecifics” (p. 205). The authors conclude that research on cows clearly shows that "Given a general definition of social complexity as the number of differentiated relationships, the knowledge about conspecifics, and the knowledge of one’s own and other animals' social interactions and relationships, cows display broad parameters of social complexity in empirical studies. They have demonstrated knowledge about conspecifics and the exchange of relevant social knowledge with conspecifics. Through dominance hierarchies and affiliative bonds, they have demonstrated knowledge about conspecifics and of their own social interactions with them." 
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>The knowledge translation gap
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>As in many other venues in which nonhumans are routinely and brutally abused, detailed information from scientific studies is not used on their behalf. Along these lines, Marino and Allen write, "Yet, despite empirical evidence for complex emotional, social, and cognitive functioning, there is still a gap between our understanding and acceptance of complex emotions and intelligence between our pets (namely, dogs and cats) and farmed or 'food' animals (Herzog, 2010; Joy, 2009)."
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>It's essential to use what we know on behalf of other animals with whom we interact, use, and abuse. Unfortunately, a "knowledge translation gap" still exists and what we know is not used on their behalf in far too many situations. Basically, the knowledge translation gap refers to the practice of ignoring tons of science showing that other animals are sentient beings and going ahead and causing intentional harm in human-oriented arenas. On the broad scale, it means that what we now know about animal cognition and emotion has not yet been translated into an evolution in human attitudes and practices (for more discussion please see "Animals Need More Freedom, Not Bigger Cages").  

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