Reflecting on the Sentience of Animals, What the Science Shows, and the Spiritual Side of Our Food

How to live in Harmony with Mother Earth:

Imagine discovering that the bee buzzing by your window experiences joy just like you do, or that the octopus in the deep blue has memories laced with emotions.

Our latest episode unravels the fascinating research on animal sentience and consciousness, revealing a world where creatures great and small lead rich inner lives.

We examine the ethical and legal implications of these findings and discuss the moral imperative to transform the way we interact with our fellow Earth inhabitants. As your guide, I'll take you through the pivotal moments of scientific revelation that have forever altered our understanding of animals and the respect they deserve.

We then discuss how you can be part of the solution as we journey into the realm of conscious eating, questioning the spiritual and emotional consequences of our food choices.

Can the act of consuming animal-based products involve absorbing more than just nutrients - perhaps the very experiences of the beings on our plates?

I invite you to reflect on this intimate link between our diets and the concept of sentience, challenging you to consider the broader implications of what's on your fork.

Together, let's explore how embracing a compassionate approach to our interactions with animals can lead to a more enlightened existence on this shared planet. Making small changes, we can all live in harmony with Mother Nature.

Resources:
NBC News
NY Declaration on Animal Consciousness

Chapters

• 0:00 Animal Sentience and Consciousness Research
• 15:27 Exploring Sentience Through Conscious Eating

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

What is sentience and what species are considered sentient? If you're a Star Trek Next Gen fan, you'll know that this was something they grappled with in regards to data. In the real world, scientists are grappling with this same question regarding the other beings we share Earth with. Join us on Season 2, episode 9 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness, to learn more about what they've discovered and what it means for animal rights moving forward. Welcome to Season 2, episode 9 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness. Welcome to Season 2, episode 9 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness. We're dropping knowledge bombs and answering your burning questions about nature, animals, spirituality, mental health, women's empowerment and other profound topics. This podcast probably won't change your life, but hopefully it will give you some food for thought, some guidance on this twisted path we call human existence. My role as an award-winning story keeper and catalyst for healing humanity and Mother Earth is to help you reawaken to your own connection with nature and, through this reconnection, reacquaint you with your intuition. What you do with it, how you incorporate that into your life, is up to you. I hope you'll make changes that benefit both you personally and Mother Earth as a whole. I hope you'll share what you learn here with others and that they'll make different, more compassionate and enlightened choices too. Either way, take what works for you, leave the rest. Always work to be the best version of yourself and try to leave the world a little better than it was when you arrived. I'm going to jump right into the seitan this week, talk to you about these amazing discoveries that scientists are making about animal sentience. I want to be very clear before I jump into this. I do not, under any circumstances. Before I jump into this, I do not, under any circumstances, condone animal testing at all. At the same time, I do recognize that in order to prove they are sentient, as I have always believed, there does have to be some sort of scientific studies done, and I can only hope and pray that those are done with the utmost compassion for the animals involved and they are as minimal as possible. All right. So, with that said, here's the deal. So over the past five years, there have been these really amazing discoveries, all of which indicate that the more scientists continue to investigate animals, the more they find that they have inner lives and are sentient. Now, they think this is pretty surprising, especially since they're looking at things like insects, fish and crustaceans. To me this is not surprising, but I love when science proves what I've always believed in my heart and soul. So here's just a couple of the cool things they've discovered Bees will play by rolling wooden balls, and they apparently just do this for fun. The cleaner race fish I think that's how you say it appears to recognize its own image in an underwater mirror.

Speaker 1: 3:40

And octopuses or is it octopi? I don't know what the plural of that is, but they seem to react to anesthetic drugs and will avoid settings where they've experienced pain in the past. Now again, I don't necessarily approve of giving them drugs and causing them pain, but if this helps people to understand that octopuses are sentient beings and not food, maybe I can temporarily suspend my dislike for a very short amount of time. And so a whole bunch of researchers about 40 of them have signed on to what they call the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, and this was presented back in April in New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. And this was presented back in April in New York. And it was pretty pivotal because all of these debates that people have been having about how species should be treated and animal cognition and all of this.

Speaker 1: 4:41

It all kind of came to a head because, right in this declaration that, again, 40 top researchers have signed says that there is strong scientific support that birds and mammals have conscious experience and a realistic probability for the consciousness of all vertebrates. And so they're including reptiles, amphibians, fish. They're also extending that to animals without backbones, such as insects, crustaceans like crabs and lobsters, mollusks like squid and octopus and cuttlefish, and I'm going to go the other side of it and I'm going to say this also very obviously, at least to me extends to animals like chickens, pigs, cows, horses, dogs, cats. You get where I'm going. And so what these researchers are saying is that and I agree is that when there is a realistic probability of a conscious experience in an animal, it is completely irresponsible to ignore that possibility in any decisions we make affecting that animal. It is completely irresponsible to ignore that possibility in any decisions we make affecting that animal. Right, you would not want your wishes ignored in decisions about you, nor do animals who have conscious experience. Just because we don't understand their language or understand their consciousness doesn't invalidate the fact that it exists. And so they're saying, in this declaration that they all signed, that we need to consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our response to these risks.

Speaker 1: 6:11

So this guy, jonathan Birch he's a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and he was a principal investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, where a lot of this data is coming out of, and he was also among that big declarations. He was among one of their first signatories, and so, where many scientists in the past assumed that questions about animal consciousness were just not even answerable, he says look, we are answering it, we're proving it, and this is very exciting because for 10 years they've been studying the minds of animals and they're daring to go there in a way they didn't before, and so they're entertaining the possibility that, like I said, that animals like bees and octopus and cuttlefish have consciousness, and so they're doing this Again. To me this is kind of like a big duh, but the impacts this has to how we interact with the beings we share the planet with are so profound. They are so profound. Think for a minute If, instead of thinking, wow, I have. You know, I'm a cattle farmer and I'm not picking on cattle farmers, everybody has to make a living. But if, instead of them thinking, I'm just raising a bunch of cows for food, like it's not a big deal. They were to consider the fact that these cows had consciousness, and how might that change what they do? I'm not going to speculate. I'm going to because I again, everyone has to make a living and as much as I am so staunchly vegan, I respect that. This is a journey everyone has to go on in their own timeline.

Speaker 1: 7:53

Now there are some challenges here. There is not a standard definition for animal sentience or consciousness and if you remember Star Trek, the Next Generation, they struggled with that same definition with regards to data and if he was able to be self-determining and sentient. So we're struggling with that now in real life. What is that definition? In general, we have some ideas. It denotes the ability to have subjective experiences and to sense and map the outside world and to have a capacity for feelings like joy or pain, and in some cases it can also mean that animals possess a level of self-awareness. Now well, not quite now, but back in like the 20th century I'm so old that to me that still seems like now prominent behavioral psychologists promoted the idea that science should only study observable behavior, but in like the 1960s, they started to reconsider this. And now Jonathan Birch like I said, the head guy here. He says that this new declaration attempts to crystallize a new emerging consciousness and it rejects the view of 100 years ago that we had no way of studying these questions scientifically. He says we do, and he's been doing it.

Speaker 1: 9:07

For example, that mirror test where the clean erase fish seemed to recognize itself. This is what they did, and this is fairly harmless, other than the fact that they're confined to a tank. So they're put in a tank that is covered with a covered mirror and they don't exhibit any unusual reactions to it. But then they lift the cover off the mirror and seven of the 10 fish launched into attacks toward the mirror. So it was almost like they saw it as a rival. And if you've ever had a beta splendent fish and put a mirror against the tank, it does the same thing Now that's a little bit cruel against the tank. It does the same thing Now that's a little bit cruel. I'm not saying it's not, but again, evidence that they are aware of what might be there.

Speaker 1: 9:51

So they did this for several days and eventually the fish settled down and realized that's not another fish and they started doing really odd things like swimming upside down, which has never been observed in this species before. And then some appeared to actually spend an unusual amount of time in the mirror examining the smells, much like people. Right, we stand there and we check our hair, we check our face. They were kind of doing the same thing. So then again, not in favor of some of these methods, but they marked the fish with a brown splotch under the skin. It was intended to resemble a Harrisbite, but it was harmless, and some of the fish actually tried to rub this off.

Speaker 1: 10:34

Up until this point. They might have only expected something like this to happen in chimps or dolphins or, of course, humans, but a fish is doing this. So they're also seeing this in other or similar behaviors in other species of fish. It's not just this one specific species of fish, okay. They've got this much broader view of what animals not just animals, but birds and invertebrates and insects and everything else what studying them looks like and what that actually means, what those results mean. So now and I love this scientists are being forced to reckon with the question which animals are not sentient? And that's pretty powerful when you think about it, because sentient beings have rights Now, living in the US right now.

Speaker 1: 11:29

As a woman, we may feel like we don't, but as a sentient being, sentient beings have rights, and so what does this mean for the law Right now in the US, nowhere are any animals classified as sentient beings on a federal level. And so what does that open up? Now, bear in mind, laws move really slowly, right, particularly when it comes to things that require humans to change their interaction with the world around them. The law moves slow and it really is going to take a grassroots push and support to change the laws around how to protect these sentient beings. That's at a federal level, state laws they vary really widely. Like 10 years ago, oregon passed a law recognizing animals as sentient and capable of feeling pain, stress and fear, and that became the bedrock of a lot of judicial opinions in that state. Meanwhile, washington and California and some other states too, lawmakers just recently considered bans on octopus farming because of the strong evidence of octopus sentience.

Speaker 1: 12:55

So it really it just opens up this huge, huge legal kind of playground for animal rights activists, because once you recognize animals as sentient, the concept of humane slaughter starts to matter and you have to question is there any such thing even as humane slaughter, which some meat-eating people try to convince vegans is a thing right, you have to consider. Is throwing a live lobster in a boiling pot actually an okay thing to do to a sentient being? I can't answer those legal questions. I am not an attorney. I am an animal rights activist and so I'll tell you from that perspective I don't think any of those appropriate reasons. I'm vegan.

Speaker 1: 13:45

But at some point the laws will shift and this research is vitally important and I hope that someday there's a way for us to convey to the animals who participated in helping scientists and lawmakers learn this important piece of information about their sentience. I hope we someday have a way to convey to them how much we appreciate their sacrifice on behalf of their species for making this knowledge known to humans in a way that would be accepted by the legal experts and by larger society, not just a bunch of vegans standing there going, but we know they have sentience. This is amazing to me. I love this. I love when science proves what I've always known in my heart and soul. I love it. I hope you love it too.

Speaker 1: 14:46

I want to leave you with a bit of a mindful thought challenge today, yours to accept or not as you wish, but I want you to. The next time you sit down to a meal, I want you to look at what's on your plate. If you're a meat eater, think about where that came from. What animal was that before it was on your plate? What sentience, thoughts, feelings, inner life may it have had? And what does your eating it do to not just the life that was cut short of that animal, but also what are you ingesting?

Speaker 1: 15:27

Right, we are as humans. We hold on to our emotions, our thoughts, our feelings in our bodies and, I would argue, any sentient being does that. Therefore, if you were eating meat on your plate, what other beings, thoughts, feelings, emotions are you bringing into your own body? And do you want to do that? Think about it. Food for thought and yes, pun intended. Did you feel a glimmer, a spark, a light in the dark during this episode? You'll love my online course, the Soulful Seeker. Check it out at sparkconsciousnessnet slash TSS. You can also support the show as a Patreon member or episode sponsor. Learn about all of these opportunities and find additional resources on the topic covered in today's episode. In the show notes, just hang on to the word sentience to help jog your memory and remind you to hop on back over to Season 2, episode 9 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness, to find all that awesome info, and I will see you next time. I'm not alone.