What is Sentience?

I was searching for an article to do this week's blog post on and I decided to go back to Doris Lin's website about animal rights. I found an article that discusses whether marine animal should be kept in aquariums.

Sentience

Sentience is the ability to suffer. All animal rights are based on sentience. Many people doubt the sentience of fish and other sea creatures. Many studies have shown that fish, crabs, penguins, marine mammals, and shrimp feel pain. Therefore, these animals are sentient and deserve rights. We do not know yet whether animals with simpler nervous systems feel pain such as anemones, jellyfish, and other creatures. Many animal rights activists still believe that keeping creatures with simpler nervous systems is wrong because they is no compelling reason to keep them in captivity.

 

Problems with Aquariums

Animals are confined in small tanks which can create boredom and frustration. Many aquariums will keep different species together to provide a more natural environment, but this leads to predatory animals attacking and eating the other tank life. Many animals in captivity were captured from the wild. These animals are stressed and are no used to now living in a small tank.

 

Marine Mammals

In the wild a dolphin swims on average 40 miles per day. The requirement for the size of a dolphin tank from the World Society for the Protection of Animals is only 30 feet in length. A dolphin would have to circle its tank more than 3,500 times in order to swim its natural range. Killer Whales in captivity have many skin problems. Also, captivity is the number one cause of dorsal fin collapse. In captivity the animal do not swim their natural lengths, without the support of the constant flowing water the dorsal fins collapse as the whale matures. All male captive orcas have dorsal fin collapse as well as many females. In the wild only 1% of orcas have dorsal fin collapse.

 

 

 

 

My Thoughts

I believe that no matter what species the animal is and no matter if the animal is sentient, all animals in captivity should receive animal rights. These creatures should not be kept in captivity nor bred for human purposes. All wild creatures are not our property and we can not continue to keep them in these captive situations. We are still able to make a change in our ways and how we treat these animals.

Lin, Doris. "Aquariums and Animal Rights - What's Wrong with Aquariums?" About.com News & Issues. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.