Confronting Western Conceptions of Non-Human Animal Cognition

Animal Sentience

This target article has three parts. The first briefly reviews the thinking about nonhuman animals' sentience in the Western canon: what we might know about their capacity for feeling, leading up to Bentham's famous question "can they suffer?" The second part looks at the modern development of animal welfare science and the role that animal-sentience considerations have played therein. The third part describes the launching, by Compassion in World Farming (now called Compassion), of efforts to incorporate animal sentience language into public policy and associated regulations concerning human treatment of animals. Andrew N Rowan, former professor at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine where he established the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy, former CEO of Humane Society International (HSI), and currently President of WellBeing International. Website Joyce D'Silva, Chief Executive of Compassion in World Farming from 1991 to 2005, has spoken and published widely on the welfare of farm animals and has provided evidence and advice to governments on the genetic engineering and cloning of animals as well as sustainable farming and food in the context of Climate Change. Website

Animal Sentience

Rowan et al.'s target article provides a valuable indication of the work that was required to reach the point where animals are recognised as sentient in various laws. To ensure this work was not in vain, the language of sentience needs to be used as a moral currency to demand further cultural change involving greater human respect for animals.

Animal Sentience, 2020

We welcome Mikhalevich & Powell's (2020) (M&P) call for a more "inclusive" animal ethics, but we think their proposed shift toward a moral framework that privileges false positives over false negatives will require radically revising the paradigm assumption in animal research: that there is a clear line to be drawn between sentient beings that are part of our moral community and nonsentient beings that are not. Walter Veit is a PhD candidate in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. His dissertation is on the origins of sentience and consciousness as a "mere" byproduct of the evolution of damage detection, nociception, and pain. Website Bryce Huebner is the Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is primarily interested in the structure of cognition and agency, the different kinds of minds we find in our world, and the implications of cognitive science research for ethical theorizing. Website In a letter to William Cavendish, written in 1646, Rene Descartes (1991, 173-175) considers three possibilities regarding the distribution of sentience: (i) no nonhuman animals are sentient, because the only plausible evidence of sentience is the use of a language to reveal an awareness of what things mean (ii) some nonhuman animals are sentient, because they engage in nonlinguistic behaviors so flexible that they are not fully explicable in mechanistic terms (iii) all nonhuman animals are sentient, because the cross-species continuity of biological mechanisms reveals that differences in sentience are a function of biological complexity. Like most philosophers and scientists, Descartes rejects (iii), arguing that it would require incorrect attributions of minimal sentience to simple organisms like oysters and sponges. He also rejects (ii) because it would require arbitrarily stipulating what degree of complexity is sufficient to yield sentience and could include forms of behavior that could be performed insentiently. Descartes therefore proposes accepting that only humans are sentient.

People spend much time writing and discussing clever or stupid actions, learning and memory, suffering or feeling happy, and how to deal with the various aspects of the world in which we live. These are the subjects of “Sentience and Animal Welfare by Donald M. Broom. Sentience is a term used in relation to human questions, such as when a foetus or baby is fully functioning, and how we decide when brain function has been lost in the brain-damaged or old. However, its most widespread use concerns the abilities of various animal species. How clever are the animals and what can they feel? The similarities between humans and other animals are described at length. After introducing the term sentience, the ethical background to some of the issues discussed is presented. The relevant aspects of research on cognition, feelings, emotion, awareness and motivation are explained with many examples. The concept of welfare is of key importance in our lives and in that of other animals. Hence the concept and its history are explained and the rapid developments in animal welfare science chronicled. How the methodology is being related to legislation and codes of practice is discussed. Animal welfare is a part of the sustainability of systems in which we use or have an effect on animals. The increase in the power of consumers in dictating to retail companies, production companies and governments is emphasised. Other matters discussed include the welfare of whales, animal welfare and the World Trade Organisation action on seal products, welfare aspects of the use of genetically modified and cloned animals and ethical decisions about human sentience and animal protection.

The New Bioethics, 2022

One of the primary concerns in animal research is ensuring the welfare of laboratory animals. Modern views on animal welfare emphasize the role of animal sentience, i.e. the capacity to experience subjective states such as pleasure or suffering, as a central component of welfare. The increasing official recognition of animal sentience has had large effects on laboratory animal research. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (Low et al., University of Cambridge, 2012) marked an official scientific recognition of the presence of sentience in mammals, birds, and cephalopods. Animal sentience has furthermore been recognized in legislation in the European Union, UK, New Zealand and parts of Australia, with discussions underway in other parts of the world to follow suit. In this paper, we analyze this shift towards recognition of sentience in the regulation and practice in the treatment of laboratory animals and its effects on animal welfare and use.

I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on sentience and cognition.

Between the Species, 2011

Animal people are usually confident that Cartesianism is something of the past and that modern science clearly establishes that animals are sentient beings. But actually the scientific status of sentience is anything but firmly established. Not only is the subjective point of view absent from current science; it is precluded by construction from our fundamental realms of knowledge. Physics — the mother-science once we reject Cartesian dualism — is currently unable to include sentience in its account of the world. A large part of the philosophy of mind describes a mindless mind, from which subjectivity — feeling, qualia — has been stripped, leaving only in place functional relations. This situation paves the way for discourses in which sentience seems to escape the realm of knowledge to fall into that of private beliefs, which individuals can choose as freely as their religion. This is a real obstacle to having animal sentience taken seriously; as such it has been largely underestimated. We believe it necessary for the movement for animals to understand that it cannot by-pass the “mind-matter” problem. We must not allow the existence and relevance of animal sentience to be denied in the name of science. One path we are contemplating is a “Declaration on Sentience” in which scientists and other thinkers would subscribe to the following assertion: sentience is an objective reality of the world and belongs to the realm of science. Despite the current intractability of the “mind-matter” problem, we do have something on our side. Although we cannot prove the reality of sentience, we can show it impossible for anyone to disbelieve in it — just as no one can really disbelieve in the reality of the physical world. We thus have enough reasons to reject the main ways in which sentience is denied or dismissed in many realms of current philosophy or science. These reasons are based on our own situation as sentient and deliberative beings.

Journal of Social Issues, 2009

Sentience involves having some degree of awareness but awareness of self is not as complex as some people believe. Fully functioning vertebrate animals, and some invertebrates, are sentient but neither humans nor non-humans are sentient early in development or if brain-damaged. Feelings are valuable adaptive mechanisms and an important part of welfare but are not all of welfare so the term welfare refers to all animals, not just to sentient animals. We have much to learn about what non-human animals want from us, the functioning of the more complex aspects of their brains and of our brains and how we should treat animals of each species. Animal welfare science will continue to play a major part in determining how we fulfill our obligations to the animals with which we interact.