NEWS
Sentience Should Guide Farm Welfare Practice
March 23, 2005
Compassion in World Farming, a UK group that campaigns to end factory farming, convened a mid-March 2005 conference on sentience in animals. Scientific studies are overturning the convenient fiction that farm livestock, and other species, have no awareness and cannot really be said to suffer. "Sentient animals have the capacity to experience pleasure and are motivated to seek it," according to Bristol U. Professor John Webster. "You only have to watch how cows and lambs both seek and enjoy pleasure when they lie with their heads raised to the sun on a perfect English summer's day. Just like humans." Since 1997 European law has acknowledged that animals are sentient creatures, but the USA and Canada have yet not followed suit.
An earlier CIWF report on this topic can be found at
www.animalsentience.com/images/Sentience_report_2003.pdf
Scientists now recognize that non-humans can have complex cognitive and social skills, and do possess awareness of their surroundings, their physical and psychological states and relationship to others. These abilities need not be directly related to intelligence as we usually define it.
Examples of such research include:
** Sheep that are isolated from their flock show measurable stress, which is relieved by pictures of familiar sheep faces, but not by goats' faces or plain triangles.
** Cows recognize familiar faces, form co-operative partnerships, and show pleasure in mastering new tasks, such as opening a gate for access to food. EEG and other measurements recorded the animals' excitement; "Their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their Eureka moment," experimenter Donald Broom said. Both cows and horses form friendships and perform mutual grooming.
** Pigs choose a stall from which they are promptly released after eating rather than one that has previously detained them for a while.
** Lame broiler hens choose food laced with analgesics.
** Even fish can learn to react to cues predicting a noxious stimulus. In the wild, older fish signal when danger threatens, but hatchery offspring have no chance to learn these survival skills, and remain vulnerable to predators.
** Social learning can be important for survival; it is now thought that marine mammals learn cultural traditions, so when a population is exterminated, hunting knowledge for that habitat is lost.
Such work has led researchers to suggest that many animals may be so emotionally similar to humans that welfare laws need to be reconsidered.
Researchers have no proof of subjective experience of pain or pleasure in animals (any more than in humans), but animals' ability to connect experiences implies awareness of past and potential future events. Members of communities/herds/flocks avoid harming each other, and act to maintain group stability, so one could say that social species require something like morality for their society to function. And they can suffer not only through physical cruelty, but also by lack of opportunity to exercise their natural instincts.
Steven Wise, author of `Rattling the Cage', thinks "practical autonomy" (sense of self and intentional fulfilment of desire) applies to many species including some farmed livestock. On this basis, the Great Ape project obtained legal protection from experimentation for apes in NZ and UK, although "rights" were not granted to them.
Research on animal sentience is beginning to influence animal husbandry in some countries, but not all. British theologian Andrew Linzey says "We are living through an ethical revolution when it comes to animals. We are shifting from seeing them as objects, commodities, resources, to seeing them as beings in their own right."
The director of the UK Food Animal Initiative believes farming is slowly becoming more animal-centred, but more remains to be done. FAI is developing housing with a wood-chip floor for pigs to satisfy their natural instinct to root and dig. And they are still investigating why hens allowed free range rather than battery-cage confinement might peck each other to death. Back in 1985 a UBC researchers noted that hens with congenital blindness do not do this, but deliberately breeding them may be ethically questionable.
Danish bioethicist Peter Sande notes that until there is a reliable way of gauging animals' subjective experiences, animal welfare has to be based largely on common sense. Regrettably, animal welfare committees of the European Commission are still composed entirely of scientists, often making arbitrary decisions. Sande fears this may discredit the real science, allowing sceptics in countries with little or no animal protection to dismiss welfare concerns.