Humans occupy a position of extraordinary power over other animals. We decide whether they are bred, confined, transported, killed, and eaten. Most people I know eat meat, at least occasionally. Perhaps they don’t let themselves think about what the animal might have endured on the journey to their plate. Perhaps they’ve considered it and don’t care. Perhaps they live somewhere between indifference and discomfort, and do it anyway.
My mom was a dedicated animal lover, yet she ate meat daily. When I asked her how eating animals fit with her love for animals, she breezily replied, “Oh, I just don’t think about it.”
We humans seem especially adept at pursuing self-interest while shutting out inconvenient realities that expose the conflict between what we do and the values we claim to hold.
It’s a lot easier not to trouble ourselves with thoughts about how our actions directly contribute to the suffering of other sentient beings. But I think we should.
“But the Animal is Already Dead”
One argument I’ve heard is, “Well, the animal is already dead. I’m not killing it.” But the animal’s death is not disconnected from the decision to buy meat. Supply and demand link consumer choices to what producers continue to supply. If fewer people chose to eat meat, fewer animals would be slaughtered.
So, yes, by eating meat, you are contributing to a system that breeds, confines, and kills animals for food, causing them fear, deprivation, and suffering in the process.
Over the course of a human lifetime, meat eaters eat an average of 2,000–2,600 chickens, 25–35 pigs, and 10–15 cows. The exact number will differ according to a person’s diet, but the moral point remains: these are not abstractions. These are thousands of individual animals, and suffering occurs one individual animal at a time.
Convenience, Need, and Want
There is an important difference between convenience, need, and want. For most people with regular access to ordinary grocery stores, eating animals is not a necessity. Beans, lentils, grains, potatoes, nuts, tofu, eggs, etc. are generally inexpensive, accessible foods that make satisfying and healthy meals.
Of course, people’s circumstances differ. But finding a change difficult is not the same as having no alternative. For many people, meat is not a need. It is a preference—often a deeply familiar and socially reinforced one, but a preference nonetheless.
When we can reduce suffering without sacrificing adequate nourishment, our preference for convenience and taste deserves moral scrutiny.
Looking Them in the Eye
Much of what allows people to eat animals without confronting the moral weight of it is distance. The animal is no longer seen as a living individual. Their body has been has been cut apart, packaged, refrigerated, and transformed into a product. Someone else bred them, confined them, transported them, and killed them.
Could you look that cow in the eye and kill and eat her? Could you look a chicken or pig in the eye and do the same?
If we are unwilling to look an animal in the eye and take their life ourselves, perhaps we should not be so comfortable outsourcing that violence to someone else.
Compassion in Action
Compassion becomes real when it changes what we do
Choose one meal—or one week—in which you do not eat animals. Do it as an honest experiment: a chance to notice what is habit, what is convenience, what you genuinely need, and what alternatives are available to you.
Replace at least one familiar meat-centered meal with a plant-based version this week.
Choose beans, lentils, tofu, chickpeas, or another protein you already enjoy.
Before buying meat, pause and ask: Is this something I need—or something I have simply been taught to expect?
If you eat eggs or dairy, consider making the experiment about meat first, rather than demanding an immediate all-or-nothing change.
Science and common sense clearly show that diverse animals are feeling beings
The Kind Life Reprinted from Psychology Today with permission by Marc Bekoff
Source: public domain pictures on Pexel
Key points
Animal sentience isn’t science fiction.
The real question is not if sentience has evolved but why.
Several countries have declared that animals, including household companions and wild species, are sentient.
There aren’t degrees of sentience among different species; an individual’s joy or pain are their joy or pain.
Being sentient means having the ability to feel. A large body of scientific evidence stemming from studies of diverse species clearly shows that many nonhuman animals (animals) are sentient beings.1 These studies also show that the biodiversity of sentience is large and growing, and insects are finding themselves living well within the sentience arena as full members of the sentience club. Research shows that the emotional lives of insects are richer than many of us have ever imagined—not just in the ever-popular bees, but also in flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites too. (Darwin himself thought this! In 1872, he wrote that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy, and love.”)2
A growing number of people, including academics and non-academics, are very interested in what animals think and feel. Two recent posts—”The Eclectic Father of Cognitive Ethology“ about Donald Griffin’s seminal work and an interview with Jonathan Birch titled “The Edge of Sentience: Why Drawing Lines Is So Difficult“—have generated a good number of emails asking me to say more about the study of animal minds (the field called cognitive ethology) and animal sentience.
It’s Time to Stop Wondering If Animals Are Sentient, They Are
Source: By Marc Bekoff
These handwritten words were sent to me by Jane Goodall in 2000 after she attended a wildlife management meeting in Arusha, Tanzania. What caught my eye about her message was how she capitalized the word “feelings.” This was some years before the field of compassionate conservation emerged and began growing in leaps and bounds. In compassionate conservation, the life of every individual is valued, and sentience—their ability to feel—comes to the fore.
Studying animal sentience, consciousness, and emotion isn’t easy. Future data from comparative analyses of animal cognition, along with existing information, should help us along in developing what some people think the field of cognitive ethology needs: namely, an integrative model or theory. Perhaps it was the lack of an integrative theory of cognitive ethology and the presence of one in evolutionary biology that led many people to dismiss tenuous cognitive ethological explanations while accepting often equally tenuous evolutionary stories.
I became very interested in learning more about some of the progress made in cognitive ethology during the past two decades, so I analyzed the references in the 2007 edition of my book on animal emotions and in the highly revised and updated 2024 edition of The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy―and Why They Matter, for which I used around 300 additional references. I noted a strong increasing trend that more researchers are accepting data that clearly showed that many different animals have rich and deep emotional lives and are sentient. Furthermore, not a single reference among those I added to the new edition led to the conclusion that we are doing all we can for the animals. We can always do more.
The Real Question Is Not If Sentience Has Evolved, but Why
I know some people will respond with something like, “We really don’t know whether pigs don’t like their tails being cut off or being castrated,” or “We need more data to know that animals get bored or enjoy play.” However, it’s high time to recognize that this sort of skepticism is unwarranted and responsible for widespread and continued abuse, given the evidential database we now have. Furthermore, there are no degrees of sentience among different species; an individual’s joy and pain are their joy and pain.
Let’s Stop Bickering
We must stop pretending that we don’t know this or that about animal sentience. We need more action. While we persist in pondering the obvious, ignoring what we already know and have long known, countless nonhuman victims continue to be abused by humankind, every minute of every day, planet-wide.
There are no substitutes for rigorous research and detailed analyses of subtle behavior patterns that often go unnoticed. What we think about the nature of all sorts of animal minds truly matters for their welfare, and so it should matter to us.
People interested in cognitive ethology shouldn’t have axes to grind. Interdisciplinary input is necessary for us to gain a broad view of animal cognition. Regarding animal minds, when philosophers share what they think, they need to be clear. Those who study animal behavior need to share with philosophers and others about what they have learned and the progress being made.
The general public is closely following what science says about animal minds, and we must give them the latest and most reliable information available. We also need to listen to their stories because citizen science can guide research and inform how we interpret and explain the inner lives of other animals.
It’s anti-science to claim that nonhumans aren’t sentient. It’s not anti-science to say we must use what we know on behalf of other animals and must stop pretending we need more data. The list of the continuing mistreatment of animals in places where they have been formally recognized as sentient beings and elsewhere in the world goes on and on.
Declaring nonhumans to be sentient beings is surely most welcome, but for now, it’s often more of a “feel-good” move, another instance of humane-washing. Future human generations will surely look back and wonder how we could have continued failing to use the science, history, and politics of sentience to protect sentient nonhumans.
An essay titled “Animal sentience: history, science, and politics“ by Andrew Rowan and his colleagues is an excellent state-of-the-art summary of what we know and don’t know about animal sentience.
Rowan and his co-authors noted:
So far, however, there has been little evidence that the various declarations that animals are sentient in other countries and regions have had much direct impact on animal protection legislation or how animals are actually being treated.
Nevertheless, it is very unlikely that incorporating animal sentience language in legislation would be harmful to the interests of animals in any way.
We can, and we must do better. Solid science, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, and a dose of common sense can lead the way. Surely, it’s time to stop wondering if other animals are sentient—they clearly are.
* Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published more than 30 books including The Emotional Lives of Animals and has won many awards for his research and writing. His homepage is marcbekoff.com
Untold Animal Stories 