Are animals sentient beings

Answer 1

There are many types of animals. An earthworm is an animal, and it is undoubtedly not sentient. It has no brain, just a nerve ganglion, with negligible intelligence. A chimpanzee is also an animal, and they are estimated to have an intelligence comparable to that of a five year old human child, which clearly does fall within the range of sentience. So it depends which species we are talking about.

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It depends on how you use the term "sentient".

1. If it broadly defined to simply "able to experience sensations", then any organism with sensory organs is sentient.
2. If it is limited a bit to he concept of "able to feel pleasure and pain" then it gets more murky since we have no way to determine for certain if the response of an animal translates to the same things we call pleasure and pain but we believe most "higher" animals are able to be sentient by this second definition.
3. If we further limit it to the ability to reason and think abstractly, this is little evidence that animals are sentient to that degree.

Answer 2

Sentience is the ability of an organism to perceive the environment and experience sensations such as pain, suffering, pleasure, and comfort. An organism that is sentient has the ability to receive stimuli from the environment, and then interpret the stimuli as sensations or emotions. The sensations may feel good, bad, or neutral. The organism determines how best to act based on the sensation or emotion, and uses bodily responses or behaviors, in order to avoid negative sensations such as pain and suffering, and achieve positive sensations, such as pleasure or comfort.

All vertebrates have sensory organs and central nervous systems, and are undoubtedly sentient. Certainly, the vast majority of the animals humans use for food, clothing, labor, and entertainment are sentient. They feel pain, fear violence, and are highly aware of the world around them. They have families, desires, and personalities. They like the taste of certain food, enjoy the company of others, and value many of the qualities of life that humans do.

Scientists believe that many invertebrates, including octopus and squid, and crabs and lobsters, are also sentient. If in doubt, we should assume that all animals feel pain and can suffer and, therefore, take action to avoid causing pain and suffering to them.

Sentience has nothing to do with intelligence, the ability to reason, or the ability to think abstractly. We know, for example, that intellectually and developmentally disabled humans who may have limited intelligence, abilities to reason, and abilities to think abstractly, are still sentient. Anyone who has ever accidentally stepped on a dog's tail knows that a dog feels pain.

Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the pioneering cognitive ethologists in the United States, believes that "Scientists do have ample, detailed, empirical facts to declare that nonhuman animals are sentient beings, and with each study, there are fewer and fewer skeptics."