Sentience? Who questions that dogs are not sentient? Perhaps not many people but a lot of people don’t give it any thought or insufficient thought. A lot of people don’t know what the word means. And this little video reminds us that dogs are very sentient and intelligent. Sentience means that an animal feels emotion including pain and a range of at least basic emotional experiences. But it goes beyond that. Dogs also can think at least reasonably rationally when it is required of them. They can think in altruistic terms in helping another unconditionally.
They can have empathy for another’s well-being and suffering. And they can demonstrate commonsense by which I mean this dog decided that the other dog needed to be saved because they were stuck in a well. Common sense dictated that something had to happen and the dog decided that it was them who was going to make things happen.
I wish the Asian people involved in the gruesome and ghastly dog meat ‘festival’ (so-called – more like an obscene nightmare) in new Yulin, China in which dogs are brutally killed and eaten could see this video. Perhaps some can but I don’t think it happens because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), blocks Western social media. Chinese citizens are kept in the dark about these sorts of things. And these videos educate.
In the West, over the past decade, there has been a huge education of hundreds of millions of people about animal welfare and other matters thanks to the Internet. Social media, for all its fluff, nonsense and banality also educates on occasions.
Particularly in respect of animal welfare. Many animal advocates and animal rights campaigners push for change on social media. In doing so they educate people who might have a tendency to abuse animals. Education is the route to an improvement in animal welfare. It needs to happen.
The CCP puts a block on educating the masses of their country in respect of animal welfare. That is why they are rooted in the past with their abominations of traditions which allow dogs and cats to be brutally killed in an unregulated way. And the wet food markets were allowed to exist because of ignorance. This caused Covid-19 and millions of human deaths.
You watch the people who kill dogs at this ‘festival’ (festival of blood-thirsty killings). They love it. They love to harm dogs and cats. It’s quite disgusting. It’s quite shocking and we in the West look on, impotent. Completely impotent and hopeless. We complain like I am but nobody reads the words.
We complain on Twitter but the Chinese do not read Twitter posts. Perhaps some, a very small number do but by-and-large they don’t and it is depressing to know that.
