“FARM ANIMALS AREN’T SENTIENT”
Photo by Human Cruelties
I can’t believe someone would actually say that in 2021. But ‘thanks’ to this person, there is the best reason for me to talk about “sentience.”
In dictionary definitions, sentience is defined as “able to experience feelings,” “responsive to or conscious of sense impressions,” and “capable of feeling things through physical senses.” Sentient beings experience wanted emotions like happiness, joy, and gratitude, and unwanted ones like of pain, suffering, and grief.
Sentient beings, therefore, have a heart, a central nervous system, and a brain, which separates them from plants that do have some primitive form of cognition but they do not possess any known form of higher cognition, and they cannot feel pain in the scientific sense of the word.
Animal ethics have come a long way. Other animals—non-human ones— haven’t been recognized as sentient and therefore morally considered worthy of life just because they are different.
In an oft-quoted passage from ‘The Principles of Morals and Legislation’ (1789), Jeremy Bentham addresses the issue of our treatment of animals with the following words: “the question is not, Can they reason? Nor, can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” … “there are no good reasons, scientific or philosophical, for denying that animals feel pain.”
In the book ‘Animal Liberation’ first published in 1975, philosopher Peter Singer defines speciesism as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.”
Speciesism allowed us to inscribe an inferior status on animals and to regard them not as individuals, but as objects and means to fulfill our desires.
According to this argument and view, the same philosophy must be applied to other situations where someone inflicts harm on someone else for sensual pleasure, but that … would be reprehensible and unethical, wouldn’t it?
It is interesting that while we can spend hours watching the potato harvest, we cannot bear and dare to watch the slaughter of sentient beings. Saying it all, don’t you think?
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