Those alert to animal sentience already find themselves in difficult situations. Richard Dawkins, for example, has declared: “We have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do.” This, Dawkins says, should change our cultural habits. Practices such as branding cattle, castration without anaesthetic and bullfighting, for instance, “should be treated as morally equivalent to doing the same thing to human beings”. [...]
There’s no escape via the “lower” animals, though. Plenty of research suggests that chickens are not unfeeling meat stores on two drumsticks. They suffer distress, even when they are not suffering themselves. Uncomfortable as it may be to learn this, chickens demonstrate empathy for one another. Studies of fish brains and behaviour suggest that intensive farming practices are almost certainly causing fish conscious distress. And then there are the cephalopods: the octopus, squid and cuttlefish. Their brains have the capacity to think, plan, reflect and learn and almost certainly feel, in the same way that humans do. Octopuses make this clear, showing intention and imagination when they carry shelters with them, build settlements, vary their hunting habits from day to day and escape from captivity when given the chance. Thanks to revelations such as these, while I still eat cows, sheep and pigs, I no longer eat octopus. It’s my own little cognitive dissonance; after all, I haven’t quite given up eating cuttlefish, even though I know about studies that show that they, like cats and dogs, dream when asleep. I have, unconsciously, drawn a line. [...]
Bioethicist David Mellor, who was influential in drafting New Zealand’s progressive animal welfare legislation, says our deepened scientific understanding of the animal experience means we should move away from giving the animals in our care mere “freedoms” from negative experience; we should, instead, be ensuring they enjoy lives that are “worth living”.
No comments:
Post a Comment