Sentient Beings
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM David Jack James
January 26, 2021 Facebook post

Are the fleeting taste sensations of flesh, organs, and bodily secretions really that important, when there are so many nutritious and delicious alternatives?

sentient beings

Charles Darwin is one of the most influential humans in history (best known for his contributions to the science of evolution), and he recognized that animals are sentient beings over 150 years ago. Sentience is the ability to experience life through emotions as a fully self-aware individual. Sentient beings are unique individuals who are conscious and experience sense perceptions.

Just like dogs and cats, other animals such as chickens, cows, pigs, and turkeys are not machines or mere objects. They have central nervous systems and pain receptors. They have full self-awareness and a sense of the future. They have desires, preferences, and interests. They are emotional beings with the ability to experience pleasure, pain, agony, and fear.

Are the fleeting taste sensations of flesh, organs, and bodily secretions really that important, when there are so many nutritious and delicious alternatives that don’t come from the suffering and slaughter of sentient beings? Please think about your food choices and ask yourself if you are being ethical and compassionate, and if causing pain and suffering and slaughter to sentient beings for nothing more than momentary, trivial taste pleasure...is who you really are.

“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in [other] animals… [Other] animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, etc., when playing together, like our own children.”
~ Charles Darwin, “The Descent Of Man” (published in 1871)

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