An Accessible Overview of the Concept of Sentience Throughout the Animal Kingdom and Why It Matters to Humans
Animal Welfare explores the concept of sentience and the development of sentient minds throughout the animal kingdom. The work provides improved definitions and analysis of the ideas of sentience, cognition, and consciousness, along with evidence of advanced mental formulation in birds, fish, and invertebrates. Considerations between humans and animals are also discussed, such as outcome-based ethics in relation to humans' duties of care and the rights and wrongs of domestication. The work is divided into three parts and covers key topics such as:
Specifics of animal sentience, from pain and suffering, to fear and dread, all the way to animals' social life and the comfort/joy/hope/despair they experience
What we know about the sentience of different classes of animals in the waters, air, savannah/plains, and forests
Considerations on human interactions based on animal sentience, including death (killing), animal farms, animals in laboratories, wild animals in captivity, and animals in sports and entertainment
Analysis on what humans can learn from animals based on what we know about their varying levels of sentience
Animal Welfare serves as an invaluable analysis of animal sentience for students, teachers, and professionals directly involved in the study, teaching, and applications of animal behavior, motivation, and welfare. Thanks to the wide-ranging implications of animal sentience, the work will also appeal to everyone with a broader interest in animal behavior and human/animal interactions.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Animal Welfare an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Animal Welfare by John Webster in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medicine & Veterinary Medicine. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
I think I could turn and live with animalsâŚI look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake at night and whine about their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented by the mania of owning things.
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
1 Setting the Scene
Some years ago, I took part in a late night, âbearâpitâ style television debate on the rights and wrongs of fishing. My role was to present scientific evidence as to whether fish can experience pain and fear. In brief, the evidence shows they can. After I had outlined the results of this work, a member of the audience got up and said âThis is all rubbish. These scientists donât know what they are talking about. I have been fishing all my life and I know for certain that fish donât feel anythingâ. He then added âWhat sort of fish were they anyway? and when I said âcarpâ he said: âAh well, carp are clever buggersâ. These four words encapsulate the need for this book. We sort of assume animals have minds. We may even think we understand the meaning of sentience but most of us donât give it much thought, because, for most of us, most animals donât much matter.
This book is written for those for whom it matters a lot. My central aim is to equip you to seek a better understanding of the minds of sentient animals. To this end, it will not only give an outline review of existing knowledge relating to the mental processes that determine animal behaviour and welfare but also offer suggestions and guidance on how to approach subjects where we know little or have been relying on easy preconceptions. Those of us who embark on the scientific study of animal welfare, their needs, their behaviour and their motivation, are cautioned to avoid the fallacy of anthropomorphism: the fallacy of ascribing human characteristics to other animals. However, I suggest at the outset, that it is valid to apply a principle of reverse anthropomorphism that asks not âhow would this chicken, cow, horseâ feel if it were me but how would I feel if I were one of them?â As we shall see, thought experiments based on the principle of reverse anthropomorphism provide the basis for most studies in motivation analysis.
This voyage into the minds of sentient minds is going to be quite a journey. The nature of sentience is far too complex to be encapsulated within a oneâline definition, such as âthe capacity to experience feelingsâ. Chapter 2 examines in detail the meaning and nature of consciousness and the sentient mind within the animal kingdom. To keep this enquiry as simple as possible, I shall consider the animal mind almost entirely as an abstract concept, within the brain and powered by the brain (mostly), but as an intangible compendium of information bank, instruction manual, filter and digital processor of incoming sensations and information. It is not too farâfetched to make the analogy with the digital computer and describe the brain as the hardware and the mind as the software. The neurophysiology involved in driving the hardware has its own beauty, but that is another story.
Through evolution by natural selection, animals have acquired behavioural skills appropriate to their design (phenotype) and natural environment. All animals are equipped at birth with a basic set of mental software: instructions genetically coded as a result of generations of adaptation to the physical and social challenges of the environments in which they evolved. This, which I shall hereafter refer to as their mental birthâright, is instinctive and hard wired. In some species that we may define as primitive, their responses to stimuli may always be restricted to invariant, hardâwired, preâprogrammed responses to sensations induced by environmental stimuli. According to oneâs definition, this alone may be sufficient to classify them as sentient. However, throughout the animal kingdom, from the octopus to the great apes, we find overwhelming evidence of species that exhibit sentience to a higher degree. They build on this instinctive birthright and develop their minds. They learn to recognise, interpret and memorise new experiences in the form of feelings, good, bad or indifferent, and develop patterns of behaviour designed to promote their wellbeing measured, in all cases, in terms of primitive needs such as the relief of hunger and pain and, within the deeper, inner circles of sentience, feelings of companionship, comfort and joy. The ability to operate on the basis of knowledge acquired from experience, rather than pure instinct, enriches the physical and mental skills the sentient animal can recruit to cope with the challenges of life and promote an emotional sense of wellbeing. It also carries the potential for suffering when coping becomes too difficult.
The physical and mental skills and resources present at birth are those acquired through adaptation of their ancestors to the ancestral environment, because these were the skills that mattered the most. Animals that demonstrate deeper degrees of sentience have the capacity to develop these inborn, instinctive skills throughout their lifetime and teach these new skills to subsequent generations. Differing demands of differing environments mean that each species exhibits a portfolio of skills most appropriate to their special needs. It follows that, in our eyes, individual species may appear to be brilliant at some things and dumb at others. Raptor birds that hunt by day develop an exquisite visual ability to locate their prey whereas bats that hunt at night use radar based on ultrasound. The albatross can navigate its way home to its nest across the barren expanses of the Southern Ocean but will fail to recognise its chick if it has blown out of the nest. Domestication distorts the process of natural selection in two ways. We compel these animals to adapt to an environment largely determined by us, and this may be very different from that of their ancestors. We also introduce the entirely unnatural business of breeding: we tinker with the physical and mental phenotype of our animals to suit our needs for food, fashion, recreation or unqualified love.
We cannot observe animals through our eyes and conclude that any one species is better, or more highly developed than another. Each species adapts to meet its own special needs and the skills required to meet these needs vary in their nature and complexity. Pigs are good at being pigs, sheep are good at being sheep. Rats are very good at being rats because they have had to develop the physical and mental skills necessary for survival in a complex and frequently hostile environment. Sharks are very good at being sharks but, because they have thrived for millennia in a foodârich, stable environment, they have never really had to think. Many dogs are not very good at being dogs because they have not had the chance to grow up in an environment of dogs.
Human Attitudes to Animals
Most of this book is devoted to an exploration of the minds of sentient animals, their feelings, thoughts and motivation to behaviour seen so far as possible, through their own eyes. Human attitudes to animals would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that our actions, based on our attitudes, can have such a profound effect on their lives. In an earlier book, âAnimal Welfare: A Cool Eye towards Edenâ (76) I wrote âMan has dominion over the animals whether we like it or not. Wherever we share space on the planet, and this includes all but the most inaccessible regions of land, sea and air, it is we that determine where and how they shall live. We may elect to put a battery hen in a cage or establish a game reserve to protect the tiger but in each case the decision is ours, not theirs. We make a pet of the hamster but poison the rat. These human decisions are driven by the same incentives that motivate nonâhuman animals since they reflect the will of us as individuals and as a species to survive and achieve a sense of wellâbeing. We need good food and we seek highly nutritious eggs at little cost. We need good hygiene and seek to remove rats that carry germs. We choose to provide for our pets in sickness and in health because they enrich the lives of us and our children. We admire the tiger not only for its fearful symmetry but as a symbol of freedom itself, so we offer it more freedom than we give the laying hen. However, in either case it is impossible to escape the conclusion that both are living on our terms.â
The history of human attitudes to animals (and to other humans) is awash with ignorance and inhumanity. The European JudeoâChristian belief was inscribed in Genesis as âevery beast of the earth and every fowl of the airâŚI have given for meatâ. The attitude of other religions to nonâhuman animals varies. Of the Eastern religions, Taoism and Buddhism recognise the sentience of our fellow mortals and treat them with respect. More of this later. So far as I can gather, Confucianism regards nonâhuman animals as commodities or tools, and therefore âoff the pageâ so far as philosophy is concerned. Islam and Judaism display rituals of respect for their food animals at the point of slaughter but these bring no comfort to the conscious animal while it bleeds to death. The Hindu veneration of the Holy Cow is driven more by fear of divine retribution than any concern for animal welfare.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596â1650) sought to justify the JudeoâChristian attitude by asserting that humans are fundamentally different from all other animals because we alone possess mind, or consciousness. His notorious phrase Cogito ergo sum â I think, therefore I am â further implied non cogitant ergo non sunt â they donât think therefore they arenât. He saw nonâhuman animals as automata, equivalent to clockwork toys, and thereby provided an âethicalâ basis for treating them simply as commodities on the assumption that it is not possible to be cruel to animals because they lack the capacity to suffer. His view may appear to us as totally lacking in any understanding of animals. However, he was not alone. For most of history, the moral concepts of right and wrong were applied only to intentions and actions within the human species. The utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham (1748â1832) was an exception when he wrote of animals âthe question is not can they reasonâŚ. but can they suffer?â. The supreme challenge to this limited concept of morality came from Albert Schweitzer who wrote âthe great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all that comes within his reachâ. This became the basis for his principle of reverence for life (10).
The last Century has seen a steady progression of the evolution of morality into law. The UK Protection of Animals Act (1911) made it an offence to âcause unnecessary suffering by doing or omitting to do any actâ (59). The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam acknowledged that âsince animals are sentient beings, members should pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animalsâ (73). The UK Animal Welfare Act (2006) imposed a duty of care on responsible persons to provide for the basic needs of their animals (both farmed animals and pets) (25). This act signified a considerable advance, since it is no longer necessary to prove that suffering has occurred, it is only necessary to establish that animals are being kept or being bred in such a way that is liable to cause suffering. These proscriptive laws are written in broad terms, which gives them the flexibility to deal with a range of specific circumstances. However, they beg several questions: âwhat constitutes suffering, especially necessary suffering? âwhat are the welfare requirement of animals?â, and (above all) âwhat is meant by sentience?â One of the main aims of this book is to guide all those directly and indirectly involved in matters of animal welfare (which means almost everybody) towards a deeper understanding of the complex biological and psychological properties of animal minds that determine their perception and their behaviour, thus determining the principles that should govern our approach to their welfare.
Despite the evidence of progress in the law relating to the protection of animals, there is still too much evidence of cruelty, both deliberate and mindless. Deliberate cruelty is a crime punishable by law and relatively rare. Mindless cruelty is far more common. It reflects a mindset conditioned by ignorance or training to the assumption that animals are automata, thus incapable of suffering. We are constantly presented with images of abuses to animals from all over the world. I cite only three examples.
A few years ago, Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) released a shocking video of behaviour in a small abattoir. Lambs for ...