Animal sentience and the precautionary principle
By Jonathan C. P. Birch. 2017
271 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In debates about animal sentience, the precautionary principle is often invoked. The idea is that when the evidence of sentience is inconclusive, we should “give the animal the benefit of the doubt” or “err on the side of caution” in formulating animal protection legislation. Yet there remains confusion as to whether it is appropriate to apply the precautionary principle in this context, and, if so, what “applying the precautionary principle” means in practice regarding the burden of proof for animal sentience. Here I construct a version of the precautionary principle tailored to the question of animal sentience together with a practical framework for implementing it. I explain and defend the key features of this framework, argue that it is well-aligned current practice in animal welfare science, and consider and reject a number of influential counterarguments to the use of precautionary reasoning in this area
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Genetics, Small Animals
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1dc4a5b005e2b0a7514d50e055a8286beca7340
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Genetics
In Small Animals
Citations in the corpus
- Minds without spines: Evolutionarily inclusive animal ethics (2020, background): “Birch (2017) proposes a version of PP that is specifically tailored to the animal welfare context, which he calls the Animal Sentience Precautionary Principle (ASPP).”