FOUR PAWS Spotlights Animal Sentience on World Animal Day at the United Nations

Animals can feel. They have needs, preferences, and individual personalities. They experience the world around them, and their lives matter. In other words, animals are sentient.  

Earlier this month, FOUR PAWS advocated for the recognition of animal sentience and the inclusion of animal welfare on the global stage at the United Nations. In celebration of World Animal Day, we co-hosted a luncheon at the UN Headquarters in New York City entitled, “The Overlooked Role of Animals in Addressing Global Challenges: Relevance, Perspective and Pathways.” Co-hosted by France and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the event featured speeches by FOUR PAWS CEO, Josef Pfabigan, Chief Programme Officer, Luciana D'Abramo, and Mathieu Perrot of the Permanent Mission of France to the UN.  

We Animals, an organization that advocates for animals through photojournalism, provided an exhibit of beautiful photographs, which highlight animal sentience, and We Animals Founder, Jo-Anne McArthur gave a moving keynote speech. “When we acknowledge animal sentience and safeguard their welfare, we strengthen our communities, deepen our shared compassion, and build global resilience. Animal welfare is not separate from the Sustainable Development Goals; it is a catalyst for achieving them,” said Jo-Anne McArthur.  

The high-level luncheon inside the Delegates Dining Room also featured a policy discussion with a panel of experts on animal sentience, including: Carolina Nascimento, PhD, Senior Specialist at FOUR PAWS International; Alexandre Brochard, Multilateral Advisor on Health for the Permanent Mission of France to the UN; Tim Scott, Policy Advisor and Programme Manager at UNDP; Becca Franks, PhD, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU; and Melanie Challenger, ethicist, author and founding member of Animals in the Room, who served as moderator.  

Guests included policymakers, Member State representatives, academic experts, donors, journalists, and artists who partnered with FOUR PAWS on the recent Counting Sheep Art Trail in NYC. During a Q&A, guests from around the world showed support for animal welfare, with one guest even calling for the inclusion of animal welfare in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the future.   

Since animals are sentient, our choices, industries, and laws should reflect that reality. As Luciana D’Ambramo said to close out the event, "Once we truly see animals that way, it becomes much harder to see them as commodities, resources, units of production, or simply numbers in a system... It's why I keep coming back to One Health. The well-being of animals, people, and the planet cannot be separated. Recognizing animal sentience isn't only the right thing to do. It's a practical foundation for building sustainable systems." 

Sentience is the capacity of living beings to have subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, fear, happiness, joy, and others. It reflects an individual's ability to evaluate actions and reactions, both their own and those of others, to remember some of their actions and their consequences, and to assess risks and benefits. Sentience involves cognition, feelings, emotions, and certain levels of awareness. 

In plain terms: animals feel.  They're aware, they remember, and they have their own point of view. And the more we learn, the more surprising it gets.  

Chickens can recognize over 100 faces, including people, and their cognitive skills rival those of a dog or cat. Pigs are considered one of the smartest species on the planet, ranking above dogs, and can even solve problems faster than them. Cows can smell things up to ten kilometers away. Sheep build friendships, stick up for one another, and feel sad when a companion is sent away.  

And this isn't just true for the species usually perceived as “clever” like chimpanzees or horses, it applies to most animals, from rabbits and sheep to ducks, guinea pigs and ferrets. 

Explicit legal recognition of animals as sentient beings is the first important step towards tangible animal welfare improvements.  

Animal sentience was first explicitly recognized at EU level in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty Protocol on the Protection and Welfare of Animals and was subsequently incorporated into EU primary law through Article 13 TFEU, which entered into force with the Treaty of Lisbon 2009. It requires EU member states to “pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals.” Unfortunately, there is no definition of sentience itself, the species covered or what “full regard" actually means in this context.  

In 2020, Athar Minallah, Former Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court in Pakistan authored a landmark decision relating to animal welfare and sentience, which set the stage for one of FOUR PAWS’ most high-profile rescues. Justice Minallah authored the Islamabad High Court's opinion recognizing the rights of non-human living beings that freed Kaavan the Asian elephant and more than 800 other captive wild animals from the inappropriate conditions at Marghazar Zoo.  Without this courageous decision, Kaavan’s rescue may never have happened. 

At a talk earlier this year at Harvard University, Justice Minallah said, “Rights derive from life itself, not from language, intelligence or reciprocity,” and "Declared rights must become lived realities." 

Explicit legal recognition of animal sentience alone is not enough; real consequences follow only when effective regulatory and enforcement mechanisms are in place.  

The United Kingdom remains one of the few jurisdictions to explicitly recognize both decapod crustaceans and cephalopod mollusks as sentient beings in legislation. Other countries, notably Switzerland, New Zealand, Norway and Austria, have adopted welfare protections for decapod crustaceans that reflect growing scientific acceptance of their capacity to suffer. 

In the United States, there is no federal law relating to animal sentience. However, there is positive momentum in the US. Organizations like the Nonhuman Rights Project have made strides to gain recognition of animal sentience and rights through litigation, and in April of 2024, thought leaders and scientists in the field of animal consciousness shared The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness and presented their research through a forum provided by New York University. 

But recognition on paper is only the start. It truly matters when it shapes our laws, our industries, and the everyday choices we make. Recognizing animals as sentient beings should mean ensuring that their needs and well-being are considered in practice, including alongside economic and production priorities. 

At FOUR PAWS, we believe every animal deserves a life worth living, and every one of us has a part to play in making that happen. Let’s keep working towards a world where animals are treated with the respect they deserve.