Fundamental Change

Last year in the UK, The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 gave legal recognition that non-human vertebrates (along with any cephalopod molluscs and any decapod crustaceans) are sentient. On 25th May this year the Animal Sentience Committee was launched. 

So, sheep are sentient. No ifs. No buts. Sheep are recognised to have feelings - joy, fear, pain, distress, and so on. This recognition represents a ‘game-changer’. No longer can any human argue that sheep don’t feel. The law says that they do. No longer can anyone act towards sheep as if they did not have feelings. For anyone who is involved with sheep to profess ignorance of sheep being sentient is not acceptable. No longer can treatment of sheep that causes suffering to them be justified. No longer can it be ignored when a sheep is being made to suffer directly by human action or through human choices and decisions.

A plethora of things in the sheep farming process come to mind which, with the formal recognition of sheep’s sentience, must now be re-evaluated, for seeing if they are suitable to be allowed and continued in the new situation of legal acceptance that sheep have feelings. 

In his book Animal Liberation Now ((2023), Peter Singer, the philosopher and animal rights campaigner, says this: ‘If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.’  

Much rides on the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act’s recognition of sheep’s sentience, and on how strongly that recognition is promulgated and enforced. Vital is instilling in the sheep farming community an awareness of the sentience of sheep, and of the consequences therefrom concerning how sheep farming procedures and actions should be. But it is wider than that. For all of us is the duty and obligation to demonstrate cognisance and acceptance that sheep are sentient.