Animals are Sentient
I didn’t know there was any controversy over whether or not animals are sentient. I would guess that most people at least minimally believe animals have some sentience. However, I’ve found myself in two separate animal rights discussions this week alone with opponents who firmly believed animals were fully instinctual, habitual machines. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, when I was younger, I remember adults telling me all kinds of “difference between humans and other animals” stories. For instance, “animals are instinctual, humans have free will.” After getting my education in biology, I learned this was a false dichotomy. After some discussion, It appears to be a misunderstanding of the word “sentience” and perhaps not an actual disagreement: Random House Dictionary “condition or character; capacity for sensation or feeling.” Collins English Dictionary “1.the state or quality of being sentient; awareness. 2.sense perception not involving intelligence or mental perception; feeling.” Webster’s English Dictionary “1: a sentient quality or state. 2: feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought.” From these definitions, it must be the case that if an animal can feel pain and is aware, he or she is sentient, de facto. However, this spawned several questions from my friends. Two of which I will discuss: Webster’s English Dictionary “having or showing great wisdom or sound judgment.” Whether or not animals have sapience, I don’t know, but is it relevant? If you were being physically assaulted, barred from moving freely, or any other condition of slavery, is sentience not enough for it to be an injustice?
What is sentience?
(1) By this logic, are plants like trees and blades of grass sentient?
(2) If this is all sentience is, having nothing to do with intelligence, why should animals be afforded the right not to be property based on this alone?
What is not sentience?
One of my followers on Twitter aptly noted people confuse sentience with sapience. (Last definition, I swear. Then we’ll get on with it.)
What about plants, are they not sentient? Dan Cudahy of Unpopular Vegan Essays has an excellent analysis of this question. But we can review this briefly.
Most of the claims of plant sentience point to reactions from plants. The assumption is that if they are responding to their environment, they are sentient. However, this does not support any claim that the plant is aware.
A chicken feels a cut, feels sorrow from being locked up, she feels this with a brain. She senses the environment through nerves in the peripheral nervous system which connect to a central nervous system (CNS). The CNS is responsible for cognition and makes sense of the senses, so to speak.
How do we know what it’s like to be a plant? We can observe nonsentient reactions in our own bodies. When the doctor taps above your knee cap, (s)he is testing your reflex arc, specifically, the patellar reflex. A reflex arc is like any other tactile stimulation except that it does not go to the brain, the CNS.
The nerve impulse goes from a nerve in the knee, to the spinal cord and back to the quadriceps muscle. Of course, you could argue that you sensed the instrument hit your knee, but we could numb the skin on and around your knee and the reflex would still occur.
This reflex is completely thoughtless, yet it is arguably far more complex than the reflexes of plants. Plants have no brains; they don’t even have nerves. This demonstrates empirically the responsibility of the CNS to sentience. If plants are sentient for their reactions, we would have to argue that brain dead human beings are still sentient because their reflex arcs are still intact (That’s another article.)
Surely there are some fringe organisms who lie in a grey area of sentience, I understand this. However, none such organisms that I know of are those which we domesticate for our use.
Why does sentience matter?
While we’re talking about the brain, what is it that makes ours so different from the other animals? The strongest difference in my research is the development of the neocortex. Briefly, it is responsible for things like symbolic language and social organization. Animals have a neocortex, just not as large, proportionally.
But what about the rest of the brain? There is nothing to suggest the nerves and neurons themselves are more superior in humans than in nonhuman animals. For the most part, pain is pain.
If there is anything to suggest our intellect can make this pain more painful, we have to ask why we would need this intellect for this to matter?
Is it equally as likely that a lack of such intellect can make pain more painful?
Animal rights ideology points to sentience as the only necessary cognitive factor required for the one basic right not to be property. The reason why is simple: if a being is consciously aware of their desire to do something, they must possess the fundamental right not to be property. As property, you cannot have fundamental rights.
This is a short version of this explanation, but a more in depth discussion can be found in Gary L. Francione’s Animals, Property, and the Law.
Rich and poor
For brevity, consider the following analogy. I am a rich person, and I can tell you that the poor do not have the same kind of enjoyment of their food as we do. There is no reason to say the poor have the right to or even need tasty food.
My meals consist of 100% organic, fresh exotic fruits and vegetables prepared by my own private chef. They are drizzled with pure cacao and gold flakes. You see where I’m going with this. Contrast this to the processed, freeze-dried, microwaved food the poor eat. The disparity between my food and theirs is enormous. Clearly, my tastes are superior.
