Animal Sentience and Welfare Campaign

ANIMAL SENTIENCE
AND WELFARE

Scientists, like Mellor, have started to recognise that many animals are sentient.

What does animal sentience mean?

Sentience is the capacity of animals to consciously perceive by the senses; to consciously feel or experience their surroundings subjectively. It’s the capacity of animals to experience feelings and emotions, including both positive and negative sensations like pleasure, pain, fear, joy, frustration and comfort.

So do animals feel too? For those questions we turn to science and investigate the phenomenon of animal sentience.

Do they feel too?

Do non-human animals operate solely on instinct, on fight or flight response and other survival mechanisms, or can we attribute more human-like capabilities to animals?

Do they feel too?

Scientists have proven that animals have neurological substrates complex enough to support conscious experiences.

The ability of animals to feel and experience emotions, such as joy, pleasure, pain, fear, boredom, hunger, warmth, and excitement now has a solid grounding in science.

Are animals sentient beings?

The word sentience comes from the Latin word ‘sentire’ which means to feel.

These can be good feelings such as pleasure, warmth, joy, comfort, excitement, or negative feelings of pain, anxiety, distress, boredom, hunger, and thirst.

For social species like lions in the wild, this includes demonstrating the ability to form social bonds, affection, camaraderie and protectiveness with siblings and parents, curiosity and play.

Captivity compromises health

Global scientific consensus exists that animal sentience underpins animal welfare.

Health is one of Mellor’s Five Domains to assess animal welfare. Captivity can harm the health of lions through an increased risk of disease, injury and functional impairment.

Mellor’s Five Domains Model for animal welfare assessment recognises four functional domains (nutrition, physical environment, health, and behavioural interactions) and a fifth domain of the animal’s mental state.

Being kept in captivity compromises many aspects of the Five Domains.

Recognition of animal sentience

Recognition of animal sentience created a radical shift, not only in the way we view the moral status of animals, but also how we provide for and ensure their welfare and well-being.

Unacceptable environmental conditions common in captivity include close confinement and crowding, hot and cold extremes (lack of shelter in this example), loud and unpleasant noise and odours, monotony and lack of sleep and adequate rest.

Captivity compromises behaviour

Animal Behaviour is one of Mellor’s Five Domains to assess animal welfare. Captivity can be detrimental to the behaviour of lions and other captive predators through inappropriate interactions (or lack thereof) with its environment, other animals and/or humans leading to boredom, depression, helplessness, anger, frustration, loneliness, a desire to play, sexual frustration, anxiety, fear and exhaustion.

An animal's mental state

An animal’s Mental state is one of Mellor’s Five Domains to assess animal welfare. Captivity can be detrimental to the mental state of lions and other predators through various undesirable conditions that cause a feeling of thirst, hunger, anxiety, fear, pain or distress.

The four functional domains together highlight the conditions that may cause negative or positive experiences that all contribute to the animal’s mental state and are ultimately essential for the survival and well-being of the animal.

What does science tells us about depression in animals?

While many stakeholders in the commercial wildlife industry believe that animals respond to their environments based on instincts alone, science has demonstrated that animals can experience depression-like behaviours. This information is not new as an early (and highly unethical) study conducted in the late 1960s by Martin Seligman, an American psychologist, showed that dogs subjected to unavoidable electrical shocks gave up trying to escape their environments after repeated exposure. The phenomenon was termed ‘learned helplessness’ and became an important model for understanding depression in humans and animals.

South Africa Legislation

South African legislation and policy doesn’t formally recognise animal sentience, but court rulings have shown more progressive attitudes towards animals.

– In 2008, the Supreme Court of Appeal recognised that animals are capable of suffering and feeling pain.

– In 2016, a Constitutional Court made the groundbreaking statement that “the rationale behind protecting animal welfare has shifted from merely safeguarding the moral status of humans to placing intrinsic value on animals as individuals”.

– This means that our courts place value on animals simply by virtue of being alive, regardless of their usefulness or benefit to humans. A Constitutional Court decision is binding and cannot be changed by any other court.

Constitutional Court

In 2016, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the highest court in our country, recognised animal welfare as a fundamental principle of our Constitution.

They acknowledged the sentience of animals and the importance of their protection, explicitly stating that “animal welfare has shifted from merely safeguarding the moral status of humans to placing intrinsic value on animals as individuals”.

The Constitutional Court further stated that “our courts now afford increasingly robust protection to animal welfare”.