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The Long Road from Religious and Ethical Traditions to Welfare of Invertebrates
Version 1
: Received: 30 November 2023 / Approved: 1 December 2023 / Online: 1 December 2023 (13:36:15 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Mather, J.A. The Long Road from Religious and Ethical Traditions to Welfare of Invertebrates. Animals 2024, 14, 1005. Mather, J.A. The Long Road from Religious and Ethical Traditions to Welfare of Invertebrates. Animals 2024, 14, 1005.
Abstract
Ethical behaviour tends to lead to welfare consideration of animals, but much less so for invertebrates. Indigenous tradition often valued all animals having an important role in the life on the planet, a practical application of modern ecology. The Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition postulated ‘man’ as having dominion over all the earth, resulting in anthropocentrism and careless practices. In contrast, the Buddhist/Hindu beliefs in rebirth leads to ahisma or doing no harm. In the face of capitalist systems, practice does not necessarily follow these beliefs, especially in the ‘shepherding’ of domestic animals. Only the Jainist beliefs value the lives of all invertebrates. Philosophers are often divorced from the physiological reality of the animals they muse about and science’s traditions of objectivity and the simplest possible explanation of behaviour led to ignorance of invertebrates’ abilities. With the new information about sentience in some of these animals, moral standing and welfare consideration has sometimes been extended to invertebrates, but we have a long distance to go to consider recognition and care of all these 97% of the animals on the planet.
Keywords
Invertebrates; welfare; ethics; religious values; moral standing; sentience
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Animal Science, Veterinary Science and Zoology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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