Support for legal recognition of animal sentience is growing in Canada. But experts say that recognition is not enough to change how animals are treated.
In April, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May presented a petition to the House of Commons asking the government to pass legislation “recognizing animals as the sentient beings that they are, and not mere property.”
Nearly 24,000 Canadians, including numerous scientists, signed the petition. The federal government’s response to the petition is due later this month.
The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, which represents veterinarians, has also urged Ottawa to legally recognize the sentience of animals.
A similar petition, signed by both humans and animals, was presented to the House of Commons by a Liberal MP in 2024. In response, the government said that courts have recognized animal sentience but did not indicate it would change the law.
Animal advocates and legal experts say that recognizing animal sentience is unlikely to advance animal protections on its own, but can be an important first step.
“It may not have any practical impact, and certainly not in the short term,” said Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, an advocacy organization that supported the petition.
“I don’t think it’s the most important thing that [animals] need, but I think it’s really significant symbolically, to recognize.”
Property questions
Sentience refers to the ability to experience pain or pleasure.
Scientists have repeatedly proven that animals, just like humans, feel pain or pleasure.
Sentience is what prompts people and animals to avoid situations that bring pain and to seek things that cause pleasure, says Kristin Andrews, a philosophy professor and York Research Chair in Animal Minds at York University who supported the petition.
Most people understand that household pets or highly intelligent animals, like dolphins, are sentient, Andrews says. But science also shows invertebrates — animals that do not have backbones, like crabs and insects — also feel pleasure and pain.
Despite this, animals are still classified as property in federal laws. For example, animal cruelty is listed as a property crime in the Criminal Code.
Most people do not think animals are property though, says Angela Fernandez, an animal law professor at the University of Toronto. She has suggested that animals are best thought of as “quasi-property” — something between a person and piece of property.
“[Animals] have some things in common with regular property, but they also have things that protect them from being just treated like a sofa or dishwasher or a laptop,” she said.
Animal welfare
Some agricultural associations have argued that classifying animals as property is not inherently harmful to them.
“There is a legal obligation for the owner or caregiver to provide for the standards of care to the animals,” the Ontario Federation of Agriculture wrote in a 2020 brief to the Ontario government. Those legal protections exist because an animal is considered property, the federation wrote.
The federation, which advocates for Ontario’s agri-food sector, also questioned if animal sentience is comparable to human sentience.
“As animals and humans are built and function differently, it is unfair to automatically attribute the sensations experienced by humans to be the same as those experienced by animals,” it wrote.
Animal abuse needs to be prosecuted, the federation says. But it prefers the concept of animal welfare to animal rights.
“Animal welfare is the premise that we humans have an ethical, moral or religious obligation to treat animals well; provide them with food, water, shelter; protect them from injury or predation and provide appropriate medical treatment when required,” the federation’s brief said.
In an email, the federation acknowledged the importance of the issue. But the federation was not able to provide additional information before deadline.
Family life
Animal advocates would like to make it easier to advocate for animal protections. Legally recognizing animal sentience could help with that, says Sophie Gaillard, a lawyer for the Montreal SPCA, an animal welfare organization.
The Montreal SPCA endorsed the latest federal petition about animal sentience. It also lobbied the Quebec government to recognize animal sentience, which Quebec did in 2015. Quebec is the only Canadian jurisdiction to have done so.
Quebec’s law says that animals are sentient and “are not things.” But it also says that laws about property still apply to animals.
This has caused a lot of legal debate, says Gaillard. “In the same breath, we’re saying animals are not things, but yet all the laws that apply to things continue to apply to animals.”
The law is having some impact. In March, Quebec’s housing tribunal found that a no-pet clause in a rental agreement was an unreasonable intrusion into a person’s family life and violated provincial charter rights.
“An animal is not property,” the decision says, citing Quebec’s law.
Deciding to have a pet is “a choice situated at the very heart of the organization of family life, that is to say, a decision regarding the composition of the family,” the decision continues.
Gaillard, whose organization intervened in the case, says that Quebec’s recognition of animal sentience was an important part of the legal argument.
But without changing laws to better protect animals, recognizing animal sentience does not lead to change, she says.
“[Recognizing animal sentience] creates a very good stepping stone for further legislative reforms,” Gaillard said.
Gaillard says she also sees “increased momentum around animal rights” among the general public.
Andrews, at York University, hopes animal sentience will be recognized legally and more broadly in society.
“Our expectation should be that all animals are sentient,” she said. “That should be our default assumption.”
