As will become apparent from the following discussion the debate over animal sentience has, like a growing number of present-day issues, become rather polarized.
Professor Georgia Mason, in the department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph, was one of the speakers at the conference. I contacted her to seek her views on animal sentience. She said she fully supported the CVMA’s position paper. In response to my question, she explained the difference between sentience and consciousness by saying that sentience is a type of basic consciousness.
The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, signed by a prominent group of scientists, which Prof. Mason thinks goes too far, states that “the absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.“.
In 1987 a survey of neonatal nurses demonstrated that 79 per cent thought analgesia was underused, with 33 per cent of babies receiving no post-operative analgesia and 34 per cent receiving no analgesia before invasive procedures.
It wasn’t until 1987 that the medical profession finally woke up from its self-serving state of ignorance, by the publication of a groundbreaking paper by K.J.S. Anand, head of the department of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.