The New Yorker:

Insects make up about forty per cent of living species, and we tend to kill them without pause. New research explores the possibility that they are sentient.

By Shayla Love

One of the stranger effects of Brexit was that, after the United Kingdom left the European Union, in 2020, it no longer recognized animals as “sentient beings.” When the U.K. was an E.U. member state, it was bound by European laws, including the Lisbon Treaty, which invoked sentience in order to shield animals from sensations such as pain, hunger, and fear. But, after Brexit, the U.K. was no longer subject to the treaty. Numerous advocacy groups demanded a replacement animal-sentience law. Twenty-nine leading veterinarians, who treated cattle, birds, fish, dogs, and other animals, sent a letter to the Daily Telegraph. “Scientific evidence demonstrates the ability of animals across a range of species to have feelings,” they wrote. “We have fought for legislation that places a duty on the state to recognise this.”

In 2021, the U.K. government introduced a bill that covered only vertebrates—animals with backbones. More protests followed. Ninety-seven per cent of animals—think clams, crabs, cicadas—are invertebrates. An octopus does not have a backbone, but in the Netflix documentary “My Octopus Teacher,” from 2020, we see one that appears curious, uses shells as body armor, and seems to bond and play with a person. In the naturalist Sy Montgomery’s nonfiction book “The Soul of an Octopus,” she visits an octopus and observes that the animal “had not only remembered us and recognized us; she had wanted to touch us again.” And whatever happened to considering the lobster?

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