Dr Noah Wekesa, Minister of Education in Kenya, has taken a courageous step in becoming the first signatory to a global petition to the United Nations for the recognition of Animal Sentience. The target is 10 million signatures and anyone wishing to sign on should go to www.animalsmatter.org

But what is it that prevents us from recognizing something so patently obvious as Animal Sentience - the capacity for pain and pleasure?

Rev. Prof. Andrew Linzey of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University, helps our understanding of this when he talks about the power of language and the power of misdescription, in the book Animals, Ethics and Trade (published by Earthscan). Thus, in order to subjugate black people during the apartheid era, whites had to describe blacks in such a way that they became them - not us. Words like non-white and group areas endorsed this separation. Likewise, it would be easy for us to kill alien deer on Table Mountain but we couldn't do this if we were to describe them as part of our national heritage.

The difference between a terrorist and a freedom-fighter, or a Palestinian and an Israeli, is that one does not belong to us and the other does. It is fine to eat beef, slaughter livestock, abuse units of production, hunt predators and experiment on models in the laboratory. Every one of these words shields us from the pain, mental suffering, stress, terror, shock, anxiety, fear, trauma and foreboding that it is so obvious that animals feel. That is why even the word animal is a label of separation, and thus a misdescription that weakens our inhibition against abuse in that it hides the reality of a range of differentiated beings of startling variety and complexity.

Says Andrew Linzey: 'The language we use is the language of past thought. We shall not possess a new understanding of animals unless we actively challenge the language we use which is the language of historic denigration. The challenge is how to create a nomenclature - born of moral imagination and a sense of fellow feeling - that does justice to animals.'

Sincerely,
Louise van der Merwe
South African Representative: Compassion in World Farming
CEO: The Humane Education Trust
Editor: Animal Voice