Which animals should be considered sentient in the eyes of the law?

[Judi Lynn]

Jonathan Birch
UK government proposals to recognise vertebrates as sentient beings are welcome, but this should be just the start

Sun 16 May 2021 08.13 EDT

Look a dog in the eye and a conscious being looks back. A being that feels hunger, thirst, warmth, cold, fear, comfort, pleasure, pain, joy. No one can seriously doubt this. The same is true of any mammal. You cannot watch rats playing hide and seek and doubt that they have feelings – that they are sentient creatures. But as animals become more distant from us in evolutionary terms, some doubt begins to creep in.

Consider a bee sneaking past the guards of a rival colony to steal honey. Or the Brazilian ants that, in order to hide their nest at the end of each day, seal off the entrance from the outside. Left out in the cold at night, these ants will never see the morning, but their sacrifice increases the chance that their sisters will. The urge to attribute feelings to insects can be surprisingly strong.

But then we think: wait, can we really talk like this? An insect’s brain is organised completely differently from a mammal’s. It is also much smaller (a bee has about 1m neurons, compared with our 100bn). Could insects be robot-like evolved machines with absolutely no experience or feeling? Or are we underestimating what a small brain can do?

New laws to impose some consistency in this area have been needed for a while. So the animal welfare (sentience) bill, introduced to parliament on Thursday, is a welcome development, as is the creation of an animal sentience committee. The bill includes vertebrates by default, but explicitly allows invertebrates to be added through statutory instruments. I can see the rationale for such an approach in an area where the science is moving quickly.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/16/animals-feel-humans-evidence-sentient

[msongs]

1. viruses are clearly sentient nt

[Judi Lynn]

2. From apes to birds, there are 65 animal species that "laugh"

Laughter is spread widely across mammals and occurs in birds, too.
DOUG JOHNSON - 5/17/2021, 8:57 AM

Among humans, laughter can signify a lot of different things, from intimacy to discomfort. Among animals, however, laughter usually communicates something along the lines of “this is playtime—I’m not actually going for your throat.”

According to new research from the University of California, Los Angeles, there are likely at least 65 different creatures, including humans, that make these vocalizations. They’re most commonly found in primates, but they have also been noted in distant relatives like birds. It’s not clear whether this is because laughter has arisen several times over the course of evolution or if it’s more widespread and we just haven’t noticed.

Laughter in the library stacks
To reach this number, Sasha Winkler, a PhD student in UCLA’s anthropology department, searched high and low for any mention of animals making noises during play sessions. Some of the articles she found were quite old—one paper on mink dates back to 1931—so she ended up dusting off some aged tomes in the university’s library.

Finding this data wasn’t always easy, as play vocalizations haven’t been extensively studied across species. “Maybe a lot of animals do have play vocalizations [and] they're just really quiet,” Winkler told Ars. “We just need to study them better.”

Not all of these noises sound like human laughter—or even the kind of “chuckles” of various other primates, she said. The Rocky Mountain elk, for instance, makes a kind of squealing sound. Conversely, a hyena’s characteristic laugh may sound eerily like a human giggle, but it’s not a play signal.

According to Winkler, animals often use these play vocalizations to indicate that they are not acting aggressively during play fights or other “rough and tumble” interactions. They also act to defuse the possibility of escalation. “[Some actions] could be interpreted as aggression. The vocalization kind of helps to signal during that interaction that 'I'm not actually going to bite you in the neck. This is just going to be a mock bite,'” she said. “It helps the interaction not escalate into real aggression.”

More:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/from-apes-to-birds-there-are-65-animal-species-that-laugh/

[Judi Lynn]

3. Laughter is a key part of play for many animals

Laughing says, "I'm only play-biting you, not real-biting you."

BY HANNAH SEO MAY 18, 2021



When we think of all the creatures who laugh, humans and hyenas are probably the only ones that come to mind. But recently, scientists combed through the literature and found that at least 65 diverse species of animals produce vocalizations that could be analogous to a human chuckle. And hyenas are not one of them.

Human laughter is a vocalization that signals play, which is an important and complex social interaction, according to anthropologists and cognitive scientists in a recent paper. But humans are certainly not the only animals that play, so the researchers parsed through existing data to see which other animals produce “play vocalizations,” and whether those sounds were exclusive to play.

The 65 snickering species identified vary from our close ape relatives, like chimpanzees or bonobos, to more surprising mammals like slow lorises, sea lions, and orcas. But non-mammals made the list too, specifically three birds: kea parrots, parakeets, and Australian magpies. Hyenas didn’t make the cut, on the other hand, because their cackles are decidedly not for play. While 28 species out of the 65 had sounds that were exclusive to play, it’s still unclear whether the vast majority of giggly creatures have specific sounds for play purposes. The findings were published in Bioacoustics in April.

Sixty-five might seem like a high number, but it’s possible that many more species produce laugh-like noises. It could be that “a lot of animals do have play vocalizations [and] they’re just really quiet,” paper co-author and UCLA anthropology graduate student Sasha Winkler told Ars Technica. Until scientists try to comprehensively document play sounds in all animals, we won’t know which creatures are or are not capable of laughter.

More:
https://www.popsci.com/animals/animal-laughter/

[Warpy]

4. Altruism extemds down to the level of bacteria

which not only self destruct to release chemical signals to other bacteria that an attack is underway, they also merge cell membranes to exchange useful DNA, something responsible for multi species antibiotic resistance.

Pretty damned cool.