Will Buckingham comments on the issue of there perhaps being more to the “lower animals” than we would prefer to believe.
…The implications of this are rather far reaching, however; because whilst granting pain to animals implies a certain basic level of moral concern, to see animals as capable of more complex pleasures is to permit the possibility of an intrinsic value to animal life that goes beyond the instrumentality that underpins a lot of our practices, and it forces us to start to think about animals as individuals rather than just as species. What if the pig we are tucking into (or the fish, for that matter) is not just one member of the class of objects denoted by the word ‘pig’, but a creature with an inner life, with its interests and pleasures and with its own sense of the value of life?
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