Find our Sentientist Conversation here on YouTube and here on all the podcast platforms.

Aditya is the wild animal suffering outreach coordinator for Animal Ethics.org. He works in grass-roots animal activism with a variety of organisations. He is studying Animal Protection Law at the National Legal Studies Research Institute in India.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” As well as the video above, the audio is on our Sentientism Podcast here on Apple and on the other platforms too.

We discuss:
0:00 Welcome

1:22 Aditya’s Intro – Animal Advocacy in India

2:10 What’s Real? From Hinduism to naturalism

• Growing up Hindu and vegetarian
• Vedanta. Dualistic theism. Dharma
• Exploring other forms of spirituality after getting into animal advocacy
• Veganism clashed with the culture (e.g. dairy)
• Buddhism
• Jiddu Krishnamurti, embracing naturalism and rationalism.

5:00 What Matters Morally?

• The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would want to be treated
• Learning about sentience, suffering & harm
• “I used to just consider humans… but when I adopted a dog (Gini!) my whole worldview shifted”
• Ahimsa as a theme in many worldviews, but most vegetarians in India don’t have a strong connection with farmed animal suffering
• Sentience as central – the capacity to feel pain or pleasure
• Singer’s Animal Liberation
• Sharing a stress reaction with Gini to fireworks
• “When you realise that all you’ve been taught through your life is wrong”
• Speciesism & arbitrary discrimination
• Going vegan. Practically easy but some social challenges
• Bio, ecocentrism, holism
• Nature as sacred in some traditions
• “We need to focus on sentient beings not abstract entities”
• “Who is being harmed?”
• Don’t harm sentient beings to protect non-sentient things
• A lack of relationship doesn’t justify moral exclusion
• Even simpler sentients might suffer just as much
• It’s not just avoiding harming, its an obligation to help
• It doesn’t matter whether the cause of harm is human or not 19:00 Wild animal suffering
• We need to correct the belief that “if humans leave nature alone nature will be perfect”. Nature is not idyllic
• High offspring r-strategies drive massive suffering & death

26:15 The Future – dystopias & utopias

• The risk of creating new dystopias (e.g. insect farming, colonising other planets with more farmed/wild sentient suffering, artificial sentients)
• Ending speciesism & granting moral consideration to all sentients
• Technology is a double-edged sword
• We need moral as well as tech innovation
• Fixing current problems & avoiding creating new ones

30:26 Which entities are sentient?

• Sentience as a biologically evolved class of information processing
• Updating our assessment of sentience using science
• Is centralisation of structures required?
• Might simpler animals experience more intense or time compressed suffering (frame rates)?
• Sentience as multi-dimensional. Intensity isn’t all that matters
• Humans can mitigate our suffering in ways other animals might not be able to
• “Haven’t these people heard of plants?”
• Precautionary principle re: invertebrates
• High confidence (so far!) plants aren’t sentient

35:00 Human, transhuman, farmed animal, wild animal futures

• Pragmatic & radical wild animal interventions: Vaccination, helping urban wild animals, rescue, ecosystem interventions, gene drives…
• The emerging field of welfare biology
• Human hubris, unintended consequences & prudence
• Building advocate & public support via research
• Do we also underestimate the good aspects of wild animal experience too? (Heather Browning)
• Some animals (e.g. elephants) seem to have good lives
• Rewilding low suffering ecosystems w/short trophic chains

44:43 Anti-speciesism & sentientism

• Talking more about speciesism & sentientism
• Going beyond farmed animals to consider wild animals
• Race, caste, gender, species etc. aren’t morally salient “What matters is that we are all sentient”
• Animal Ethics’ Wild Animal Suffering YouTube course
• Animal Ethics website is now in 8 languages

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info​​​​​​​​​​​​​. Join Aditya on our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.

​Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. Our biggest so far is here on FaceBook.

Thanks Graham for the post-prod.