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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Dissonance Between Knowing Animals Are Sentient Beings Yet Eating Them, Yana Bender, Juliane Bräuer
The Dissonance Between Knowing Animals Are Sentient Beings Yet Eating Them, Yana Bender, Juliane Bräuer
Animal Sentience
Animal sentience is linked to the bigger picture of climate and health crises and “carnism” is a factor in the dissonance among (1) knowing animals are sentient, (2) caring about their feelings, and (3) not acting accordingly. We discuss our responsibility as researchers and as individual human beings.
Heeding The Call Of Covid-19, David Wiebers, Valery Feigin
Heeding The Call Of Covid-19, David Wiebers, Valery Feigin
Animal Sentience
We are grateful to all of our commentators. They have provided a wide range of valuable perspectives and insights from many fields, revealing a broad interest in the subject matter. Nearly all the commentaries have helped to affirm, refine, expand, amplify, deepen, interpret, elaborate, or apply the messages in the target article. Some have offered critiques and suggestions that help us address certain issues in greater detail, including several points concerning industrialized farming and the wildlife trade. Overall, there is great awareness and strong consensus among commentators that any solution for preventing future pandemics and other related health crises must …
Appealing To Human Intuitions To Reduce Animal Abuse, Yzar S. Wehbe, Todd K. Shackelford
Appealing To Human Intuitions To Reduce Animal Abuse, Yzar S. Wehbe, Todd K. Shackelford
Animal Sentience
Social scientists may be able to find ways to positively affect people’s evolved moral compasses, thereby doing the planet and its inhabitants a great kindness. They could help to shape a constituency that is increasingly opposed to animal abuse in its largest-scale manifestations, factory farming and wet markets. This would, in turn, motivate people to elect ethical leaders who view inaction with regard to animal abuse as a serious moral and medical mistake, if only indirectly due to factory farming’s exacerbation of the threats zoonoses pose to humans.
Cultured Meat Could Prevent The Next Pandemic, Jonathan Anomaly
Cultured Meat Could Prevent The Next Pandemic, Jonathan Anomaly
Animal Sentience
Wiebers & Feigin identify intensive agriculture and trade in exotic animals as the main sources of novel zoonotic viral infections. They recommend a transition away from meat. I would add that we would do well to invest in the mass production of cultured meat, derived from stem cells, as a radical alternative to animal agriculture.
Re-Engage With The World For Global Health And Animal Welfare, Bradley J. Bergstrom
Re-Engage With The World For Global Health And Animal Welfare, Bradley J. Bergstrom
Animal Sentience
Wiebers & Feigin (2020) make a strong argument for measures that would limit future zoonoses, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, by closing live-animal markets, changing our habits of food consumption and production, and reducing habitat destruction. These would help human health, animal welfare, and conservation of at-risk wildlife all at the same time. China’s command-and-control government can accomplish some of these things by edict, but slower-to-act western democracies play a surprisingly large role in these global problems by the power of their consumerism, including the illicit wildlife trade. We citizens need to insist that our government use all of its …
Rethinking Global Governance To Address Zoonotic Disease Risks: Connecting The Dots, Kelley Lee
Rethinking Global Governance To Address Zoonotic Disease Risks: Connecting The Dots, Kelley Lee
Animal Sentience
Large-scale changes in human behaviour are urgently needed to prevent future pandemics involving zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19. However, this will not happen to the required degree, and with sufficient speed, without a major shift in how humanity collectively governs itself. Alongside a shift in focus from individual behaviours to the structural conditions underpinning the world economy that shape human behaviours, effective global governance presses us to connect more dots than ever before. The One Health approach is an important starting point but we need to go much further.
Innovation In Meat Production: A Problem And An Opportunity, Christopher J. Bryant
Innovation In Meat Production: A Problem And An Opportunity, Christopher J. Bryant
Animal Sentience
Innovation in meat production has enabled modern humans to inflict far greater harm on animals, the environment, and public health than was possible just a few decades ago. Wiebers & Feigin aptly express the urgency with which these issues must be addressed. Those advocating for animals on moral grounds face resistance from omnivores citing taste, price and convenience. Further innovation in meat production (plant-based and cultured meat) will enable us to preserve the experience of eating meat whilst phasing out the many problems caused by industrial animal farming.
It Does Not Cost The Earth To Be Kind, Svetlana Feigin
It Does Not Cost The Earth To Be Kind, Svetlana Feigin
Animal Sentience
The COVID-19 crisis is a wake-up call on a global scale. What lessons we learn from this crisis will determine our survival as a species. The global health crisis calls for individual and collective changes in our agricultural practices and our consumption habits. Most important, it is a call for us as a species to move towards an empathic way of living and interacting with nature.
Harm, Earth Jurisprudence And Human/Nonhuman Relationships, Tanya Wyatt
Harm, Earth Jurisprudence And Human/Nonhuman Relationships, Tanya Wyatt
Animal Sentience
To prevent the next pandemic and to protect the environment and non-human animals, there needs to be a clear definition of harm and a legal system grounded in Earth Jurisprudence. Drawing on evolutionary principles to redefine harm and to radically alter the legal system to be Earth-centred will help ensure that harmful actions like certain wildlife trade, wildlife trafficking, and intensive farming do not threaten the survival of any life.