Reading the article “Smarter than you think” by Jonathan Leake and Georgia Warren in The Sunday Times recently got me thinking about animal sentience.
“Increasingly scientists believe,” they wrote, “we are merely at the top of a spectrum of intelligence across the animal kingdom, rather than standing apart from it. We may be better at thinking and more able to articulate our feelings — but animals can do all the same things.”
After all that we now know about animals, I thought, how can anyone disagree with this statement? But, sadly, many people still do. I know they do because through my work at Compassion I come across people who don’t think animals are capable of thinking and feeling. Or, if they do, the animals’ capacity to behave like us is unimportant when it is compared to our needs. Fortunately, I think this narrow-minded perspective is being challenged. There is a rapidly growing weight of evidence and official acceptance of the importance of recognising – and respecting – the sentience of animals.
Animal sentience is particularly important with respect to the animals whose lives Compassion seeks to improve. Chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, sheep, fish, ducks, geese and other animals raised for food are, I often feel, those creatures who, through no fault of their own, are often last to be thought of as having any thoughts and emotions.
As my close colleague, Joyce D’Silva, said in The Sunday Times article, “We can see their [factory farmed animals] physical distress but this research tells us it goes much deeper than that and affects their emotional health, too.”
That is why, after 10 years of campaigning, we achieved an important victory in 1997 to persuade the European Union to legally recognise animals as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and suffering. The recent adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, means the animal sentience protocol is upgraded to an Article in the Treaty. Compassion will use the increased status of this Article in our campaigns to improve the welfare of billions of farmed animals across the EU.
One of the highlights of the EU animal sentience campaign was a conference we held in London in 2005. “From Darwin to Dawkins: The Science and Implications of Animal Sentience” brought together scientists, veterinarians, ethicists, students and representatives of governmental and inter-governmental organisations and of industry and of non-governmental organisations to discuss the growing scientific and ethical understanding of animals and on how we treat them.
The conference was a landmark event in the long struggle to get the acceptance of animal sentience in public policy. Please contact our Supporter Services team today for your free copy of the DVD which contains highlights of each speaker’s presentation. You can also download a free copy of our comprehensive report, Stop – Look – Listen: Recognising the Sentience of Farm Animals, which gives examples from scientific literature on how farmed animals think and feel. And, if you want even more information, there is a book, Animals, Ethics and Trade, which includes the conference proceedings and much more.
There is no doubt that significant progress is being made but there is a lot more to be done. Animal sentience goes to the heart of animal welfare. This is why Compassion supports the campaign, Animals Matter, which is led by the World Society for the Protection of Animals and calls for a Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare. The goal is to recruit 10 million people to sign the declaration. Have you?
If you, or anyone you know, needs more information about animal sentience, please do visit our Animal Sentience blog, The Lives of Animals, to read about animals and their emotional lives.
