Animal sentience
FMRI evidence that dogs are as sentient as a two-year-old child.
As a lead and scientific justification to stop all use of dogs in biomedical research, new drug development and testing, we mooted the idea of publishing a paper to prove that dogs are as sentient as a two-year-old child, and hence must not be used as laboratory animals or in testing.
In partnership with Cruelty Free International (UK), we published a scientific paper using fMRI evidence to prove that dogs are as sentient and can feel emotions like a two-year-old human child, in the coveted Journal of Medical Ethics in 2015 — ‘Advances in neuroscience imply that harmful experiments in dogs are unethical’.
What the neuroscience shows
There exists a striking similarity between dogs and humans in the functioning of the caudate nucleus — the part of the brain associated with pleasure and emotion. Dogs experience positive emotions, empathic-like responses and demonstrate human bonding which, scientists claim, may be at least comparable with a human child aged 2 to 2.5 years.
fMRI studies have also shown an area analogous to the ‘voice area’ of primates in the canine brain, enabling dogs to comprehend and respond to emotional cues in human voices. In both species, an area near the primary auditory cortex lit up more with happy speech than unhappy speech. There is further evidence of a region in the temporal cortex of dogs involved in the processing of faces, as also observed in humans and monkeys, enabling them to interpret facial expression and associated emotions.
Putting it in a nutshell, formidable scientific evidence implies that dogs are as sentient as a child — that they understand and feel like a human infant does. It means that dogs must, and do, suffer much more than is widely accepted currently. This has profound and serious consequences for the use of dogs in harmful experiments and toxicity testing (Jarrod Bailey & Shiranee Pereira, J. Med. Ethics, 2017).