Wrong! Animals are clearly capable to experiencing pain and feeling it consciously. Human consciousness is not by any means the only consciousness necessary to perceive pain.
Anatomists used to nail the four feet of a cat or a dog to a board and proceed to disect the living animal in front of medical students in the 1700s. The excuse was that the animals had no consciousness and could not perceive pain when they clearly were in....agony.
Even worse, surgeons operated on human infants claiming -- stupidly -- that their immature nervous systems were incapable of feeling pain. For that matter boy infants are probably still circumcised without anesthesia for the same reason.