 Objectivity and simplicity are taken as goals of science, which is understood to aim at tracking the facts of the world. The value-ladenness and theory-ladenness of science, however, shows how difficult it is to achieve those goals. While this is true of science in general, with animal cognition the stakes are different. Human use of animals in food, in medicine, in work, as entertainment, and as companions raises a host of sometimes conflicting goals that scaffold motivated reasoning and risk implicit bias. The quest for truth about animal capacities relates to an over-arching philosophical theme in comparative cognition: the human-animal divide and the question of the extent and areas of continuity between the minds of humans and other animals. This is not a normatively-neutral issue, but rather, the picture that science delivers of the human-animal divide can serve to justify or undermine the practices that constitute the human-animal relationship. As we will see in  section 3,  addressing the biases and philosophical assumptions that shape the science of animal cognition is of great importance for getting things right philosophically as well as ethically.