Are animals sentient beings? Now we can decide, not rely on the EU

On Wednesday night, MPs voted by 313 to 296 against an amendment that would have transposed into British law the EU’s recognition of animals as sentient beings. What do we mean by sentient? We know, after all, that animals have sensations: they feel pain, thirst, desire. We know, too, that at least some of them have emotions: think how your dog reacts when you come home after an unusually long absence.

The question is whether animals also have consciousness. Are they aware of themselves as entities distinct from their environment? Do they remember things? Do they, in a word, think?

The balance of scientific opinion increasingly holds that they do. The higher mammals, at any rate, can adapt remembered experiences to previously unencountered situations. We can’t prove that this goes handin-hand with consciousness but, then, if you think about it, we can’t prove it about other people either. As René Descartes observed nearly 400 years ago, we can be certain only of our own consciousness. We infer from our own self-awareness that people who behave like us can also think. So what about when other creatures can also be seen behaving like us – learning, bearing grudges, displaying empathy?

In 2012, a gathering of international neuroscientists at Cambridge came down firmly on the side of sentience. Observed brain patterns, they declared, suggested that all mammals and birds, and even some fish, displayed intentional behaviour.

It’s an uncomfortable finding. We tend not to think very hard about the perspective of our livestock. We prefer to get worked up about animal cruelty that doesn’t affect our own lifestyles. Most people, for example, want bullfighting banned. Fair enough. But, on almost any measure, the fighting bull has a better life than a farm bullock. He is not separated from his mother at birth, nor are his horns removed, nor is his tail docked, nor is he castrated. He is not penned up with hundreds of his kin, nor fed on pellets. He lives a full five years in the meadows in something close to a state of nature, with no direct human contact until he enters the ring.

What we do to cattle is what we do to most domesticated beasts: we orphan them, imprison them, bore them, use them, kill them. We do so believing that their experience is qualitatively different from ours. After all, as the philosopher Roger Scruton reminds us, rights are a legal construct that animals are incapable of grasping. He accordingly argues for a duty of stewardship for humans, rather than legal entitlements for non-humans.

Either way, this is precisely the sort of issue that we ought to decide for ourselves, through our own democratic mechanisms. If Brexit means anything, it means that parliamentarians are now able to weigh these questions, answering to the rest of us. Should we, as Bertrand Russell quipped, extend equal rights to oysters? We can at last decide the matter ourselves.

Ihaven’t yet met a practising Christian who is upset by the inclusion of a Muslim family in Tesco’s Christmas TV advert. Plenty of Christians moan about the commercialisation of the holiday; but, being Christians, they also believe that Jesus came for everyone, including women in hijabs peering at turkeys: “And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Nor, indeed, have I met a British Muslim who objects to the celebration of Christmas. In both cases, offence is being taken on someone else’s behalf – always a ridiculous spectacle. Just as some on the Left object to Christian festivals in the name of imagined minority sensitivities, so some on the Right become aggressive in defence of a Christian culture that they have personally abandoned.

It’s pompous and silly as well as ungenerous. For years, people complained – with justice – about our multi-cultural absurdities. Britain was a Christian country, they said, and people should either lump it or join in. Fine. So please don’t complain when people are shown joining in. “Those Muslims, coming over here, assimilating, respecting our traditions…” FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion