No , my Friends – it is sentience , not intelligence or “ culture ” or “ sophistication ”, that is the reason why we are morally called ( and in most cases legally required ) to avoid killing our fellow humans – and yet it is this very same sentience that is equally shared by the farmed animals we brutally butcher by the billions every year … And rest assured that animals are indeed quite sentient . At its very least sentience is the conscious awareness of one ' s own existence . And this awareness is characterized in animals by – among other things – a longing to live (& an accompanying fear of death ), a fear of or a repulsion from pain , and the ability to suffer while pain is experienced &/ or tremble when death seems imminent .
In addition to these basic traits , many sentient species also exhibit some form of noticeable ability to logically reason , the tendency to engage emotionally with members of their own &/ or other species , and unique behavioral patterns that form what some like to call " individual personalities ".
And the salient point here is this one : all of these traits of sentience are quite obviously present in all species of modern-day farmed animals … As such , it is a patent fact that animals are more than conscious enough to warrant the same moral consideration as us humans ; a fact that was openly affirmed in 2012 by “ The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness ” – a prominent gathering of cognitive neuroscientists , neuropharmacologists , neurophysiologists , neuroanatomists , and computational neuroscientists who all openly agreed that , “ Convergent evidence shows that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical , neurochemical , and neurophysiological substrates of consciousness .”
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