These include, among others, a rising ecological consciousness, transformations in the perception of wilderness, and ideas about humans’ responsibilities towards-and dependency upon-sea creatures. Of course, other cultural and social factors have also played a part in extending animal welfare laws to certain invertebrates. This role was assigned to scientific experts when, around the mid-nineteenth-century, pain became the central moral criteria in animal ethics. The plausible inclusion of cephalopods and crustaceans in animal welfare legislation reveals the central role of science in shaping the moral and legal obligations towards nonhuman animals. Concretely, one possible consequence of such a move, explained a reporter in The Times, would be the outlawing of boiling lobsters alive. According to its drafters, “sentience is about animals having feelings, both positive and negative, such as pain or joy.” The bill empowers the Secretary of State to extend it to invertebrate species based on scientific evidence, which some MPs have argued, is strong enough to justify the inclusion of cephalopods (squid, octopus, cuttlefish, and nautilus) and decapod crustaceans (crayfish, crabs, and lobsters) in the bill. UK Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill recognizes that all vertebrates are “sentient” creatures. The film recently found its way to the UK House of Lords, when, calling for the extension of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill (HL Bill 4) to include invertebrates, Barbara Scott Young, Baroness Young of Old Scone, urged the drafters to view the award-winning documentary, “which explores the rather bizarre and strange but nevertheless emotional relationship between a man and an octopus.” The film was an immediate success because, among other reasons, it depicts the complexities of octopus lives and poetically shows the possibilities of attachment and attunement to these relatively unknown creatures. The documentary film My Octopus Teacher (2020), directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, depicts the exceptional relationship between a free-diver and a common octopus in a South African kelp forest. #ANIMAL SENTIENCE SERIES#This webinar series was presented by Animal Sentience Journal and WellBeing International and made possible through a grant from Effective Altruism.This is part of our special feature, Rethinking the Human in a Multispecies World. To watch a recording of the October 27th (Part 2) webinar, click here or scroll to the bottom of this page. To watch a recording of the October 20th (Part 1) webinar, click here or scroll to the bottom of this page. Harnad will be joined by a multidisciplinary panel of experts – Jonathan Birch (ethicist), Robert Elwood (neurologist), Helen Lambert (animal welfare consultant), Jennifer Mather (comparative psychologist), Giorgio Vallortigara (neurobiologist), Lars Chittka (behavioral ecologist), Irina Mikhalevich (philosopher) – for wide-ranging conversations on the sentience of crabs, lobsters, bees, octopi and other invertebrate animals long considered too simple to experience feelings of distress, pain and pleasure. Stevan Harnad, founding editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and current Editor-in-Chief of Animal Sentience. Watch our webinar series on invertebrate animal sentience, moderated by Dr.
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