Commentary Three: Deliberate Ignorance in Animal Sentience and Welfare Research

In “Deliberate Ignorance,” Cass Sunstein examines our tendency toward deliberate ignorance about human-caused animal suffering and death. He makes a useful distinction between wanting to know something and wanting not to know it, and he shows how both of these tendencies support harm to animals by leading people to avert their eyes from news that would include an unwelcome emotional or behavioral response. Animal farming is a central example. Many people avoid learning about how the animals who provide meat, milk, or eggs for humans are raised and killed, either because they anticipate that learning this information will be unpleasant, or because they anticipate it will lead to dietary change, or both.

My aim in this brief commentary is to add that this phenomenon can seep into the scientific study of animal sentience and welfare, too. That makes the problem doubly hard: Not only is the public reluctant to learn relevant information, but experts are reluctant to collect it. Two topics illustrate the dynamic. The first is wild animal welfare, where our reluctance to invest in research reinforces the ignorance that we cite to justify the status quo. The second is animal consciousness and sentience, where conveniently exclusionary default assumptions and methodological double standards have a similar effect. In both cases, ignorance about animal sentience and welfare becomes its own justification.

In many cases, we already know that animals are welfare subjects. They clearly have their own feelings and emotions, and their lives can clearly go better and worse for them.1 Yet we feel locked into current forms of abuse or neglect in part because we lack the knowledge we would need to break out of them — and we lack that knowledge in part because we feel locked into current forms of abuse and neglect. Our relationships with farmed, lab, and other captive animals are a central example, but there are plenty of other examples too.

Take our relationships with wild animals. Many experts argue that not only are we not required to promote wild animal health and welfare at scale2; we are required not to do so. Why? We lack information about how interventions affect wild animals, which of these effects would be good or bad for them, and how it all fits together to inform impact assessments. We also lack the capacity, resources, infrastructure, institutions, and political will necessary for supporting wild animals at scale3. Yet we lack this knowledge, capacity, and political will in part because we continue to neglect the issue. Our neglect of wild animal welfare thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — reinforcing the very limitations that we use to justify it.

This self-reinforcing neglect of wild animal welfare is a shame, since the issue is extremely important and at least potentially tractable. Vast numbers of wild animals suffer and die unnecessarily not only due to natural causes like hunger, thirst, illness, and injury, but also due to human causes like deforestation, development, pollution, and climate change. We could potentially do a lot of good through basic changes to infrastructure, wildlife management, and related policy areas — for instance, by installing bird-safe glass on new and renovated buildings, or by investing in humane fertility control as an alternative to lethal poison for “pest” control. But most such interventions need further research before they can be scaled4.

To be fair, these problems are genuinely difficult. Wild animal lives are shaped by complex ecological, social, political, and economic dynamics, and even well-intentioned interventions can have unintended effects. And as noted above, improving wild animal welfare at scale requires not only the knowledge about how to help, but also the capacity and political will to act on that knowledge. Even if the research community unanimously decided to prioritize this issue, it could be decades at best before we have the epistemic, practical, and motivational resources necessary to sustain effective interventions at scale. And it can certainly be reasonable for the research community to acknowledge this difficulty.

Yet there is a double standard in our response to this difficulty. In other difficult policy domains, from public health to climate, we acknowledge complexity, uncertainty, and the possibility of unintended effects without treating them as grounds for ongoing ignorance and inaction. Wild animal welfare may well be harder than some of these topics, but the degree to which we treat this difficulty as a barrier to serious research and policy far exceeds the degree to which the topic is harder than other issues we routinely address.

Similar dynamics shape the study of which animals are welfare subjects in the first place. In many cases, we have grounds for taking seriously the possibility that a given animal is conscious and sentient — that they can have feelings and emotions like pleasure, pain, happiness, suffering, hope, and fear. Yet we deprioritize these animals in part because we lack strong scientific support that they have feelings and emotions — and we lack strong scientific support that they have feelings and emotions in part because we deprioritize them.

For much of the twentieth century, scientists denied that nonhuman animals have their own feelings and emotions, assuming that purely mechanistic explanations of animal behavior were preferable. They also denied that science could challenge this assumption, since consciousness in other minds is not directly observable.5 This was basically a recipe for locking in skepticism about animal consciousness as animal farming, animal research, and other such industries were on the rise. The policy community largely followed suit. And while there were likely many reasons for this neglect of animal welfare in policy, a lack of strong scientific support for animal consciousness and sentience was plausibly among them.

This self-reinforcing neglect of animal consciousness and sentience is a shame as well. Even if consciousness in other minds is not directly observable, we still have tools for improving our estimates about this issue. Recently, philosophers and scientists have used a “marker method” for this purpose: identifying behavioral and anatomical features associated with conscious experience in humans, then searching for similar features in nonhuman animals. This method might not deliver proof, but it can deliver evidence. And in recent decades, scientists have used this evidence to establish a realistic possibility of consciousness in all vertebrates and many invertebrates, and to support proportionate protections for these animals.6

Of course, as with the study of wild animal welfare, the study of animal consciousness remains difficult. In general, consciousness is among the hardest topics in all of science and philosophy, and the further from humanity a species is behaviorally, anatomically, and evolutionarily, the harder it can be to interpret the evidence. The marker method can improve our estimates, but it still requires making judgment calls about which features matter, how much they matter, and how to apply familiar concepts like pain across taxa. Even if the research community prioritized the topic much more, it could once again be decades before we have the evidence necessary to make confident judgments about most species.

Yet this is once again a double standard. We lack the ability to directly observe the inner lives of fellow humans and charismatic companion animals too, yet we rightly extend them the presumption of consciousness. Granted, many other animals are harder to study, and it can be reasonable to acknowledge this difficulty. But the extent to which we default to non-consciousness, resist collecting evidence, and withhold proportionate protections exceeds the extent to which these animals are harder to understand.

Sunstein rightly emphasizes that we need education, advocacy, nudging, and other solutions for improving public attitudes and behavior around animal welfare issues. We can now add that we may need similar interventions for the experts meant to inform the public. We face real obstacles in understanding our effects on the welfare of sentient animals, as well as in understanding which animals are sentient in the first place. But we also exaggerate the gap between what we know about these issues and what we know about other issues that we rightly address in science and policy. We then use this perceived gap as a rationalization for not closing it, locking ourselves into the convenient stance that the status quo is the only responsible course.

What would a better approach look like? It would involve serious investment in animal welfare science, monitoring animal populations, and basic research on animal consciousness and sentience. That should include more study of positive welfare—positive states like pleasure and happiness—and better non-invasive markers or indicators of subjective experience. It should also involve more probabilistic and precautionary policies—instead of waiting for certainty before acting, we should extend a reasonable, proportionate level of care to all animals with a realistic possibility of being sentient, whether that assessment is supported by current evidence, by a reasonable starting assumption under uncertainty,7 or both.

References

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