I see where you're coming from. On a social scale it'll be more disruptive than the coming of Jesus or the Buddha. Yet ignorance has rarely yielded better results with time. If animal life is more intelligent than we let on, than not studying it is like not turning around to see the house fire because we're looking at the pretty lights dancing on the grass.

Again, I have to go back to alien life. One of two things will happen. They will see us as animals with an above average level of communication: a parrot, and not deserving of the title sentience. Or, they will see how we treat life that does meet their definition of sentience, and we eat other beings that do, too. Or, the secret third thing where we're ranked the same as the bacteria of our world.

We are in the position of those aliens making a decision about potentially sentient life. Now that we have a whiff of the embers, we should look at the fire to know how badly we've been burning it.