A PAINTING tells a thousand tales. Pieter Bruegel’s hunting dogs, for example, look as dejected as their owners in his painting Hunters in the Snow. But it tells us something really important: that from the Renaissance on, art and literature seem to have been way ahead of science in granting animals – or at any rate, mammals – some acceptance of sentience. The secular intellectual world of Leonardo da Vinci, Michel de Montaigne, Erasmus, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon took animal sentience for granted.
Philosophers were the big nay-sayers. There is a clear line of argument for non-sentience running from Aristotle to…
