Animal sense - and non-sense - A Consideration of Policy Implications: A Panel Discussion - In the Company of Animals

The tendency to treat (nonhuman) animals as inanimate or insensate objects is not "inevitably or necessarily" encouraged by treating them legally as property. Under English law, for instance, "owned" animals enjoy greater legal protection from abuse or cruelty than do many "unowned" animals living in the wild. Having said this, however, there can be little doubt that property laws have also been used to justify mistreating animals, and many of the earliest attempts to introduce animal protection legislation were blocked on the principle that people had an absolute legal right to do whatever they liked with their own property (Ryder, 1989). Clearly, the law is an ass when it allows property rights to be used to legitimize the infliction of suffering on others. However, rather than dispensing altogether with rights of ownership--a move likely to be strongly opposed by anyone with a vested interest in continued animal use(1)--it would seem more sensible, as Jerrold Tannenbaum has suggested, to seek ways of providing animals with greater protection within existing property laws. In many countries, the legal owners of historic buildings or endangered species' habitats are also legally prevented from doing whatever they like with their own. In other words, society places a special value on the building or the habitat and, by doing so, restricts the rights of the owner. I can see no obvious reason why society should not also impose comparable restrictions with respect to the treatment of animals.

At some point in the process, a decision would need to be made concerning whether the new restrictions should apply to all animals (unlikely), or just some animals based on their assumed capacity to suffer, and at this point it would probably be necessary to differentiate a special category of animals. The phrase "sentient beings" springs to mind as a possible name for this special category, although the issue of sentience, and how we begin to recognize and measure it in nonhumans, still remains an unresolved question (see below).

Answering the second part of the second question first: in the strict biological sense, "pain" is the subjective sensation arising from the stimulation of nociceptive nerve cells. We may talk about the "pain of separation" or the "pain of loss" but in these cases we are using the word in a metaphorical sense. Suffering is a much broader term than pain (Dawkins, 1980). I may "suffer" from a pain in the neck, a cold in the head, nausea, or more general feelings of illness or malaise. Feelings of boredom, hopelessness, depression, loneliness, worry, anxiety, or terror may also cause me to suffer. The pain system is phylogenetically ancient, and it is likely, based on reasonably objective anatomical and physiological criteria, that all vertebrates and at least some invertebrates (such as cephalopods) are capable of experiencing painful sensations (Bateson, 1992). The range of stimuli that may cause an individual organism to suffer probably also increases with the complexity of its nervous system, and we need to be alert to the possibility that some animals may suffer in circumstances where we would not. Animals with particularly acute hearing, for example, may be more sensitive then we are to certain wavelengths or amplitudes of sound and may suffer from prolonged exposure. Conversely, we should not assume that all mammals, say, or even all higher primates, necessarily have the same capacity to suffer as humans. Humans may suffer vicariously from the sight, or even the thought, of another's suffering, but there is little evidence that any other animal species is capable of experiencing this degree of empathic suffering (Seyfarth and Cheney, 1992). In the light of these observations, it is probably unwise to draw precise lines of demarcation between those organisms which are "sentient"--that is, capable of suffering(2)--and those which are not. It seems more appropriate at this stage to talk about different degrees and kinds of sentience.

Surprisingly, the capacity of animals to suffer or feel pain has not always been "accorded significant weight" in society's deliberations on the ethics of animal use. From classical antiquity until the early modern period in Europe, philosophical and theological discussions concerning the moral status of animals revolved almost entirely around the issue of "rationality" rather than sentience. Following the teachings of Aristotle, animals were held to be devoid of "reason" and "belief" and, as such, were denied moral consideration (Clutton-Brock, 1995). Many early debaters expressed ethical reservations about the appropriateness of killing and eating animals, but whether animals suffered or not in the process seems to have been largely immaterial (Sorabji, 1993). This curious--from a modern perspective--omission of suffering from early discussions on animal use has never been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps before the development of effective analgesics and anaesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the threshold of public sensitivity to human suffering was simply too high to allow for much concern for the suffering of nonhuman animals (Ryder, 1989). Since it is difficult to draw hard and fast distinctions between humans and nonhumans on the basis of sentience (see above), the long-standing appeal of the Aristotelian perspective may also have been the ease with which it could be used to justify the continued exploitation of those deemed to be lower down the scale of rationality (Serpell, 1986).