Did the Government Just Deny Animals Feel Pain?

Over the last week, MPs in the British Parliament voted on whether a specific clause of the Lisbon Treaty regarding animal sentience should be enshrined in British Law. Overall MPs voted against including this clause in our law. And, as you probably well know if you’ve been on Facebook in the last week, people are angry about this. On Thursday, my newsfeed was a merely a slew of different petitions to reverse this vote with claims that the government deny that animals feel pain. Tory MPs have suggested that the outcome of this vote has been distorted and misrepresented on social media and that the government does recognise animal sentience. However other MPs such as Caroline Lucas, have backed the claims of the ‘distorted and misrepresented’ social media. Did the government really just decide that animals can’t feel pain? And if they did, what does this mean for animal welfare post-Brexit?

It seems there has been at least a little misrepresentation surrounding this vote, but not as much as Tory MPs would have you believe. May insisted in Prime Minister’s Questions that her government does recognise that animals are sentient, and that her party’s reason for not enshrining the ‘Sentience Clause’ in British law was that the Animal Welfare Act 2006 already recognises animals as sentient. The Sentience Clause is redundant she thinks, so it’s needless to include it in further legislation. However the situation is not quite as cut and dry as this.

I must admit that at first sight I thought that the Animal Welfare Act was weaker than it was, and I saw a clear distinction between what it, and the Sentience Clause, said about animal sentience. Section 4 of the Animal Welfare Act states that a person commits an offence if they cause an animal to suffer. Though this implies that animals can feel pain, it definitely isn’t explicit. Though it may be an offence to cause an animal to suffer, this says nothing about whether animals do suffer or not, or what exactly could cause suffering. Of course, this legislation would be pointless if animals couldn’t suffer. Nonetheless, this section of the act doesn’t actually state that animal are sentient. In contrast the Sentience Claim from the Lisbon Treaty 2009 is as follows: ‘…the Union and the Member States shall, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals…’ This is an unambiguous claim that unequivocally recognises animals as sentient.

However there is a little more to the Animal Welfare Act. Section 9 states that an animal’s needs must be met, and that these needs include a need for a suitable environment, a suitable diet, to be able to exhibit normal behaviour, to be housed with or without other animals and to be protected from pain, suffering, injury and disease. This is a more direct statement, it tells us not only that some action is prohibited (failing to fulfil an animals’ needs) but also something about animals themselves: that they have needs to be protected from pain, suffering and injury, etc. However, this is still is not exactly a recognition that animals are capable of experiencing pain. Though those that need protection from pain, must plausibly be capable of experiencing pain, this is at best indirectly states that animals can feel pain.

One might think I’m being pedantic here. Why does it matter whether the law directly or indirectly makes a given claim, so long as it does the same job? Well, there is a worry that by keeping the more indirect statement of animal’s ability to feel pain, rather than adopting the clearer, more direct claim, those that voted against adopting the Sentience Claim are planning to try and pass legislation that takes advantage of the lack of clarity in the law. This concern is especially relevant considering the Tory’s record surrounding animal issues, e.g the badger cull and the fox-hunting ban. However this worry seems ill-founded considering May’s staunch public claims that they her party does recognise that animals are sentient (even if they don’t want to directly claim as much in law). Further, Michael Gove has also released a statement stating that the government will make necessary changes to recognise animal sentience in law. If they are planning to repeal the fox-hunting ban and push through similar anti-animal legislation, it would be foolish for a not-so-popular government, that barely has a majority, to publicly make such bold statements regarding animal welfare.

However there is a bigger problem with the suggestion that the Animal Welfare Act recognises the sentience of animals than the directness of the claim that animals are able to feel pain. Even if it was clearly stated that animals were capable of feeling pain in the act, this would still fall short of the offering the protections that the Sentience Claim offers. This is because being sentient doesn’t mean being capable of feeling pain. Or, to be more precise, being sentient doesn’t mean just being able to feel pain. Being sentient means being able to experience feelings generally. This isn’t just the ability to feel pain but the ability to feel all different kinds of subjective states: disappointment, joy, excitement, sadness, relief, grief, fear, anger. Recognition that animals are able to feel pain is not even recognition that animals are able to feel pleasure, let alone these more complex feelings. However, since evidence tells us that animals are able to feel a vast range of such feelings. So, by stating in law that animals are ‘sentient’, we open the door to legally recognising not just that they feel pain, but that they are capable of experiencing a complex spectrum of feelings and emotions. This suggests that animals are not just capable of pain but that they have lives like ours in an important way.

Not only does the Sentience Claim recognise that animals may be capable of such complex mental lives, but also that we are required to ‘pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals’. Assuming that the wealth of scientific evidence is correct, this doesn’t mean merely ensuring that they have their basic needs met, and aren’t experiencing pain or suffering, as the Animal Welfare Act suggests. For example, recent research has shown that many animals are capable of experiencing depression and anxiety. Experiencing these unpleasant states plausibly makes one’s life worse than it would otherwise be. Further anybody who was perpetually in a state of depression could not be said to have a ‘good’ life. However such states do not seems to be either painful or an instance of suffering. Neither are they injuries or a disease. As such, the Animal Welfare Act doesn’t seem to provide animals with protection from such harms. By enshrining the Sentience Clause into British Law however it would impose a legal obligation to ensure that animals do not experience a wider spectrum of psychological harms including as depression and anxiety.

Furthermore by shifting focus away from causing suffering and onto fulfilling the welfare requirements of animals, the Sentience Clause emphasises our positive legal obligations to animals. Whilst the Animal Welfare Act is clearly supposed to protect animals from having bad lives, it says nothing about ensuring that animals have good lives. There is a significant difference between not being harmed and living life in which one flourishes and has a high level of well-being. A legal obligation to pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals makes clear that our obligations don’t just extend to removing and preventing harms from animals’ lives, but also ensuring that they are given opportunities for enjoyment and happiness. This gives us a much broader range of obligations towards animals and changes the role of owners from having to avoid damaging their well-being to promoting their well-being.

So, no the government doesn’t deny that animals are capable of feeling pain, but it does fail to recognise that animals are capable of feeling much else, and this is in no way insignificant. The Sentience Clause offers a substantial difference to our legal obligations to animals. It recognises not just that animals are capable of pain and suffering but that they are sentient, that they are beings capable of feelings more generally. Further, the Sentience Clause suggests that we have more general legal obligations regarding welfare requirements, not just to ameliorate the ways in which animals’ well-being can be negatively affected but also to promote the ways in which their well-being can be positively affected.