Do Animals Think or Feel?
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Marc Bekoff, Psychology Today/Animal Emotions
June 2020

Ontario ag-gag bill proposed that animals do not think and feel 'as activists suggest.

Also read Ontario Farmers Claim that Animals Can’t Think or Feel

An email about a report called OFA [Ontario Federation of Agriculture] submission to the Standing Committee on General Government regarding the Security from Trespass and Protecting Food Safety Act (Bill 156), which contained a quotation emphatically stating, "We simply do not know if animals are capable of reasoning and cognitive thought," shocked me. I immediately read through the report and lo and behold, the authors did make this unscientific and ludicrous claim. And, not surprisingly, there isn't a single citation in the entire in-house report.

Here is the full quotation, because I don't want people to think I'm fabricating what these thoroughly uninformed people wrote.

"The concept of 'sentient beings' refers to beings with the power to reason and think. The term also implies beings with an awareness of their surroundings who respond to sensations, have cognitive thoughts and have the capacity to perceive and experience life subjectively. Feeling is a subjective state, available only to the animal feeling it. As animals and humans are built and function differently, it is unfair to automatically attribute the sensations experienced by humans to be the same as those experienced by animals. Humans have the ability to communicate their experiences, and what they feel. Since animals cannot communicate with us, there’s a huge assumption by animal activists that animals have emotional responses and the ability to reason and think, in the same way that humans do. We simply do not know if animals are capable of reasoning and cognitive thought, therefore we cannot attribute human qualities of reasoning and cognitive thought on animals as the activists would like." (My emphasis) —OFA [Ontario Federation of Agriculture] submission to the Standing Committee on General Government regarding the Security from Trespass and Protecting Food Safety Act (Bill 156)

When I read this, I was shocked. It's clearly anti-science given what we know about the cognitive and emotional lives of numerous diverse nonhuman animals (animals), including so-called "food animals....

Read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE (PDF)

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