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by hshdhdhj4444 224 days ago
I find it strange that people believe cows and sentient animals don’t believe something extremely similar to what we do.

Evolution means we all have common ancestors and are different branches of the same development tree.

So if we have sentience and they have sentience, which science keeps recognizing, belatedly, that non human animals do, shouldn’t the default presumption be our experiences are similar? Or at the very least their experience is similar to a human at an earlier stage of development, like a 2 year old?

Which is also an interesting case study given that out of convenience, humans also believed that toddlers also weren’t sentient and felt no pain, and so until not that long ago, our society would conduct all sorts of surgical procedures on babies without any sort of pain relief (circumcision being the most obvious).

It’s probably time we accept our fellow animals’s sentience and act on the obvious ethical implications of that instead of conveniently ignoring it like we did with little kids until recently.

1 comments

This crowd would sooner believe silicon hardware (an arbitrary human invention from the 50s-60s) will have the physical properties required for consciousness than accept that they participate in torturing literally a hundred billion consciousness animals every year.