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Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings in UK law
- hulitu 6y ago" The reforms will be introduced through a series of bills, including an animal sentience bill, and will cover farm animals and pets in the UK ". So only _some_ animals are sentient beings. If a cat is a pet she is sentient, if it's astray it is not.
- dennis_moore 6y agoAll animals are sentient but some are more sentient than others, I guess.
- prepend 6y agoSome sentient animals can be sterilized and/or involuntarily euthanized. Seems pretty lame if truly “sentient.” Not sure what definition of sentience they are using as certainly none of these animals are truly sentient. Arguable primates, but arguing a cat is sentient is foolish. It’s possible to assign greater protections on animals without fake labeling them through laws.
- jobigoud 6y agoAre you confusing sentient with sapient? Cats are certainly sentient.
- prepend 6y agoI think I was not understanding sentient correctly. I thought sentient meant self-conscious, but according to Wikipedia [0] it just means aware. So “dumb animals” are sentient. Thanks for the note, I’ve been misusing this for decades. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
- doggodaddo78 6y agoThe pigs are up to their old tricks again.
- jobigoud 6y agoIt is theorized that this is true in general. See "sentience quotient". All living things can be placed somewhere on this line and we can imagine entities that are more self-aware than humans.
- simonh 6y agoI believe the distinction applies to pet animals as a category, not just individual animals that are pets.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago"as the government set out a suite of animal welfare measures including... banning the import of hunting trophies." This part is surprising to me. Hunting is actually really important in a lot of areas. Deer hunting is really big where I live. It controls the deer population here, where they would become massively overpopulated without intervention. It brings in tons of revenue for our state's conservation department, providing money that is then used to restore the environment, bring back expatriated animals, and enforce wildlife laws. Hunting is similarly important in some places in Africa, providing them an incentive to maintain their local wildlife population. Seems like an odd part of the law to pass when considering this.
- phyrex 6y agoHunters specifically feed deer throughout the winter and then shoot them later on (my grandfather was very much into hunting). The whole “overpopulation” thing is a bad faith argument and doesn’t make logical sense either; there’s no way a native species wouldn’t find a healthy balance if left alone
- michael1999 6y agoWe first exterminated the wolf, and mountain lion, and suppressed coyotes. Deer (like rabbits) are machines to turn browse into more deer. The balance point is 100% deer and then collapse of the foliage.
- chrisbennet 6y agoWhen we kill all the predators, deer will eat everything and then starve. You can hunt them or reintroduce their predators.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoNot just starve. Overpopulation also drastically increases the frequency of disease in a population, they get much sicker. Plus with deer, an increased population increases road deaths from deer crossing.
- 6y ago
- vohvae 6y agoI don't know much about UK politics, but it is good to see Animal rights being taken more seriously. But I am uncomfortable with the usage of the word sentient here since the word implies a lot more than stopping mistreatment which seems to be the actual intent here. Taken to its logical conclusion, "Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings" should outlaw their slaughter for food or other products and much more essentially including whatever rights humans have. I personally feel words with strong meaning are thrown around too carelessly these days (maybe longer but I wasn't alive then) weakening their meaning and making it more difficult to capture nuance or clarity in conversation or writing.
- simonh 6y agoSentience just means the ability to perceive and feel things. It implies consciousness, but that's debated. You may be thinking of sapience, which is usually considered to comprise of a higher range of cognitive functions such as reasoning, self-awareness and perhaps theory of mind although some animals seem to have that last one too. Fundamentally what this does is further recognise in law that some animals are able to suffer, and that we have some sort of responsibility to avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering such as for entertainment or through neglect.
- vohvae 6y agoThanks for pointing this out! Until now I had been under the impression that sapient and sentient mean very similar things with a very fuzzy boundary. This does clarify a few things regarding their usage.
- cheese_goddess 6y ago> Taken to its logical conclusion, "Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings" should outlaw their slaughter for food or other products and much more essentially including whatever rights humans have. If I understand the article correctly the new law recognises (some) animals as sentient, not as humans. I can't see how "sentient" automatically means "has human rights". In any case, I bet UK laws, those that are actually written down anyway, are written so as to grant rights to categories more strict than "sentient". For example, wikipedia says that in Common English Law, "murder" is the killing of one "person" by another: > Murder is an offence under the common law of England and Wales. It is considered the most serious form of homicide, in which one person kills another with the intention to cause either death or serious injury unlawfully. In fact, from this definition it seems like "murder" is a kind of "homicide". So it seems that not only the perpetrator and the victim must be "person"s, they also must be "human" (species homo?). tl;dr, I don't think "sentient beings" are currently extended the same protections in law as "humans" or "person"s and so slaughtering them for food is not prohibited by any laws (and therefore, is allowed).
- grmatrix 6y agoNow animals have to recognize humans as sentient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_...
- intricatedetail 6y agoThis is welcome. We had a streak of cat killings in London and police is not doing much, because if someone got caught the maximum penalty for such cruelty is 6 months. It essentially means having to wear a tag for few months and maybe do some street sweeping. This is disproportionate to the trauma caused to families. For many the suffering is comparable to losing a human family member.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoWhat's "wearing a tag"?
- playpause 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_tagging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_tagging
- doggodaddo78 5y agoOh, that's called an ankle monitor, ankle bracelet, or GPS monitor in the US. Officially called electronic monitoring or electronic incarceration (e-carceration).
- jazu 6y ago6 months for killing a cat doesn’t seem unreasonable.
- intricatedetail 6y agoIt is a maximum sentence possible. I would like to see at least 5 years for that and financial compensation. People who do that to animals, should be isolated from society until they are safe to be released. Most killers start with animals. I am guessing you have never suffered such trauma and you are incapable of being close with an animal to know what it's like to lose it.
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- gumby 6y agoDespite the headline it looks like only a few, all vertebrates. Would have been much more interesting had they embraced all of the kingdom Animalia as I had hoped.
- jobigoud 6y agoIt is not clear whether all animals are sentient though. Sponges and arthropods for examples, or other animals that have only a very very small number of neurons. They could have included all vertebrates for a good start though.
- dennis_jeeves 6y agoNext: plants will be recognized as sentient beings.