Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings in UK law | Hacker News Reader

Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings in UK law

theguardian.com

42 pointssamizdis37 comments

I 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.

Sentience 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.

Thanks 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.

> 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).

"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.

It irks me that there are no links to the laws or even the actual name to look them up, but banning trophy import doesn't seem like banning hunting itself. That seemed like they're trying to subvert international trade for Rhino horns and Elephant tusks and stuff. I'm sure you can still hunt the local deer just as long as the reason isn't to export antlers to the UK for profit. International antler trade presumably only becomes profitable if deer are so rare as to be endangered, not when they're common enough that slowing the population growth is a net good. So this seems like an attempt to disincentivize the already illegal poaching of endangered species, not to prevent Africans from doing any kind of hunting at all.

Hunting is much more than about population control, I mentioned that in my comment when I said "Hunting is similarly important in some places in Africa, providing them an incentive to maintain their local wildlife population."

In poor regions of the world, incentive alignment is important for species conservation and survival. The people are often barely surviving. If there is no incentive to keep endangered species alive and thriving, then they will be killed for bushmeat. Legal, controlled hunting that brings revenue to an area will help such species survive.

> It irks me that there are no links to the laws or even the actual name to look them up

This is because it's the Queen's Speech: it's what the government of the day intends to pursue as legislation for that session. It's essentially advertising what the government's priorities are (and just as importantly, what they are not). Sessions usually last about a year and not everything in the speech always makes it through to legislation.

At this point, the legislation hasn't been drafted let alone gone through any readings in either chamber.

Hunters 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

In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to the island by the United States Coast Guard to provide an emergency food source. The Coast Guard abandoned the island a few years later, leaving the reindeer. Subsequently, the reindeer population rose to about 6,000 by 1963 and then died off in the next two years to 42 animals. A scientific study attributed the population crash to the limited food supply in interaction with climatic factors (the winter of 1963–64 was exceptionally severe in the region). By the 1980s, the reindeer population had completely died out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Matthew_Island#Mammals

> there’s no way a native species wouldn’t find a healthy balance if left alone

I guess it defines what you mean as “native” as it takes a while for species to hit equilibrium and survive. But environmental effects change that balance as well as humans.

So it seems tautologically that any species in balance is “native.”

In reality, species can easily overpopulate and go extinct or extinct others. See stuff like the North American camel that died out.

Or the gray wolf population in the US West that is growing quite too high, despite being “native.”

In my region, deer are very plentiful in suburban areas because humans crowded out their natural predators. They are native but are overpopulated. Hunting helps reduce their population. If you remove hunting then you must deal with their overpopulation some other way.

We 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.

How do you feel about invasive species[1] I.e. non-native? Is it okay to regulate their populations?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species

When we kill all the predators, deer will eat everything and then starve. You can hunt them or reintroduce their predators.

Not 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.

Where are you from? Nobody does that in Iowa and we have lot's of problems with deer population.

Here in Missouri, many people with private land plant alfalfa plots and use deer feeders and mineral blocks to help the deer grow big and healthy, with big racks that make for good trophies.

The thing is that even with areas where feeding like this doesn't occur like the Mark Twain National Forest, overpopulation is still an issue, so their claim that feeding causes issues is inaccurate, or at least incomplete and more nuanced. It just improves their quality of life and health until they're hunted. Technically it could increase the carrying capacity of the species, but because the population is managed, it's not really an issue.

Hunting isn't essential because there are many other ways for people to feed themselves that don't require killing animals with guns or bows and arrows. It's a cultural practice like eating cats or dogs.

I hunt small game a lot, always for food. I dont feel very taken by the fact that importing trophies is going to be off the table. Hunting is one thing and glofiyng killing is perhaps another completely different one.

Now animals have to recognize humans as sentient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_...

This 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.

What's "wearing a tag"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_tagging

Oh, that's called an ankle monitor, ankle bracelet, or GPS monitor in the US. Officially called electronic monitoring or electronic incarceration (e-carceration).

6 months for killing a cat doesn’t seem unreasonable.

It 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.

Despite 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.

It 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.

" 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.

All animals are sentient but some are more sentient than others, I guess.

Some 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.

Are you confusing sentient with sapient? Cats are certainly sentient.

I 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

It 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.

The pigs are up to their old tricks again.

I believe the distinction applies to pet animals as a category, not just individual animals that are pets.

Next: plants will be recognized as sentient beings.

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