The UK’s new Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill formally recognises marine invertebrates, including crabs and lobsters, as sentient and with the capacity to feel pain, joy and comfort. While that is excellent news, sadly ministers predict it will have no bearing on the fishing industry as it is now.

The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, introduced in May and passed into law this month, formally recognises animals, including certain marine invertebrates, as being sentient, feeling beings with complex emotions. This is a landmark event that could - or rather should - result in drastic changes to animal welfare laws and our legal duty to protect non-humans.

While the Bill has mandated for the establishment of an ‘animal sentience committee’ to ensure animals are considered in future legislative decisions, Animal Welfare Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith - a well-known animal advocate within the UK’s executive - has stated that there will be “no direct impact on the shellfish catching or restaurant industry.” The aim of the new bill, Goldsmith added, was to “ensure that animal welfare is well considered in future decision-making.”

The sentience bill in its original form only considered domestic vertebrate animals, such as farmed cows, sheep and pigs, plus wild vertebrates such as deer and foxes. According to reports, however, campaigners and members of the House of Lords advocated for invertebrates such as crabs and lobsters to be factored in.

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An independent review by the London School of Economics (LSE), commissioned by the government, arrived at the conclusion that there was “strong scientific evidence” that such invertebrates possess the ability to experience “feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort, and excitement,” because they have “complex central nervous systems, one of the key hallmarks of sentience.”

“The Animal Welfare Sentience Bill provides a crucial assurance that animal well-being is rightly considered when developing new laws. The science is now clear that decapods and cephalopods can feel pain and therefore it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation,” Goldsmith said.

The LSE report and the resulting changes to the Bill now mean that decapod crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters and shrimp, and cephalopod molluscs like octopuses and squids, must now be recognised as sentient beings. But unlike other sentient beings protected by the same law, like terrestrial vertebrates, marine species will see no new protections any time soon.

The fishing industry, concerned that the Bill could mean significant changes and costs, has been given assurances that it is business as usual. Instead, as stated by Goldsmith rather ambiguously, only future decisions will factor in marine animal sentience. In the meantime, fishing carries on as it always has - unsustainable, unjustifiable and unimaginably cruel.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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