When you can dive to catch your dinner, fly to avoid winter, bask on a rock to catch the sun, or dig a hole to hide from predators, sentience is what you need.
In fact, on planet Earth, with liquid water, a dynamic atmosphere, solid ground, and moving soil, sentience is likely to evolve independently all over the place. Equally, feeling comfort, pleasure, and even delight when finding maternal protection or succeeding in mating courtship will increase the chances of reaching a reproductive age-and once there, reproduce-which natural selection would favor. Feeling pain is a particularly useful tool for avoiding injury and death, and the animal species whose members did not feel pain most likely became extinct. Once life evolved the ability to move and become independent from photosynthesis, sentience inevitably evolved with it. I am an ethologist (a zoologist specialized in animal behavior), and I have never seen any animal other than poriferans (aquatic sponges) behaving in such a way that suggests a lack of sentience. This is how we know most animals are sentient, and that rocks, plants, and teddy bears are not. We don’t need to know exactly how they feel, what they experience, or how they reason. They can feel, experience, and judge, and once they have judged, they can behave accordingly. They can swallow something tasty and spit out something nasty. They can move away from something bad and get closer to something good. Animals are sentient because they can behave in a way that means they can profit from the information sentience provide them. Fortunately, we do not need to know exactly what animals are feeling, but only whether they are experiencing something positive or negative, and the behavior of the animals can tell us that. Sentient earthlingsĬoncepts such as “feelings” are subjective, and therefore available only to the animal experiencing them, and we could never prove any organism (including a human) is sentient if we based it only on that. fleeing from an adverse environment or moving towards a source of food or a mate). When I was writing my book “ Ethical Vegan: A Personal and Political Journey to Change the World,” I spent some time researching the issue of sentience, and I finally arrived at my own definition:Īt its most basic meaning, sentience is the ability to experience positive and negative sensations, which requires two things: firstly, senses to perceive the sensations from stimuli coming from the environment, and, secondly, a nervous system to process such sensations and translate them into experiences which allow the animals to react accordingly, depending on whether they are negative or positive (i.e. I disagree with this anthropocentric view. Some say that is the ability to feel “pain and pleasure,” others say is the ability to experience “suffering and happiness,” or “emotions and moods.” Some may not accept all animals feel pain or suffering, claiming they need a sophisticated level of cognition or consciousness-they argue some animals they consider “inferior,” such as worms and insects, are not sentient.
What is sentience, anyway? This concept has been defined in many ways, and definitions change with culture. I follow a philosophy based on avoiding harming any sentient being, and to be true to it I need to pay close attention to everything I do, and how I treat everyone around me. Why? Because this constantly reminds me that it is up to me to treat all sentient beings with respect, even those who may not understand human language. I know she cannot hear me or understand me-she is not a sentient being-but I say it anyway. “Hello, how’re you doing?” This is what I often say to the small black teddy bear sitting on top of the pile of old letters by my London apartment’s front door.
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