Surprise: U.K. Law Recognizes That Sentient Animals Are Sentient

U.K. law is finally going to make clear that the what is on the right is different from what is on the left. (source: www.funpawcare.com)

The U.K. is proposing to do something that is absolutely revolutionary: it is going to enshrine in law that sentient animals are sentient.

Never mind that, in 1789, Jeremy Bentham argued that the moral significance of animals did not hinge on whether animals had humanlike cognitive attributes but only on whether they are sentient: “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Never mind that the arguments of Bentham and others lead the British Parliament to pass the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act in 1822 and the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1835, as well as many other pieces of legislation, including the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and the Animal Welfare Act 2006.

Was anyone confused about whether these laws applied to rocks or bicycles, wooden stools, buildings, or blades of grass? No, of course not. These laws only made sense if animals were sentient and had interests in not experiencing pain and suffering.

But on May 13, the Tory government introduced a bill that will recognize animals as “sentient.” Big deal. That recognition has been enshrined in British law for a long, long time. But now the U.K. law will recognize that animals who can experience pain and suffering are sentient, which as about as monumental as recognizing that a person who is agreeable to reason is rational.

Why now?

The background to this is that, in 2017, when the U.K. was trying to figure out how to leave the European Union, Conservative Party MPs voted to not include in the E.U. Withdrawal Bill that portion of the Treaty of Lisbon that committed EU nations to recognize the sentience of animals. At the time, the Tories said that U.K. law already recognized that animals were sentient. That statement was undoubtedly correct. All of those U.K. laws necessarily assume that animals are sentient because they would make no sense otherwise. The law recognizes that these laws apply to animals who are “capable of experiencing pain and suffering” but does not label them as “sentient.”

The official Tory explanation was that the E.U. animal welfare law was “insufficient” and the British did not want to in any way import that insufficiency by including it in what became the E.U…