The Spanish multinational corporation, Nueva Pescanova, announced that it plans to start marketing farmed octopus (raised on an octopus “farm” in the Canary Islands) in 2023. The new UK Animal Sentience Act will raise challenging issues regarding treating “farmed” octopuses and standard practices such as killing lobsters by placing them alive and conscious in boiling water.įarming octopus has become an issue only recently.

Cephalopod suffering and distress have already been recognized in some circumstances (e.g., animal experimentation laws and regulations). The new UK Animal Sentience Act applies to all vertebrates and decapod crustaceans (e.g., lobsters, crabs, and shrimp) and cephalopod mollusks such as the octopus. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has developed a working definition of sentience as the “capacity to experience positive and negative feelings such as pleasure, joy, pain, and distress that matter to the individual.” The Government has now decided that the new bill will apply to a broader range of creatures than the vertebrates who have traditionally been considered to be sentient.

The new law does not include a definition of “sentience” but leaves it up to the Government to decide which animals qualify as sentient. Now they too have a duty to regard animals as sentient beings, and a process will be put in place to hold them to account before Parliament if they neglect that duty.” This new Act extends that approach to policymakers themselves. “The UK has an approach to animal welfare based on oversight and accountability, with processes already in place to make sure scientists and farmers take welfare into account. In the words of Professor Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics (and an advisor to the UK Government on the animal sentience issue): By contrast, the new UK act has no declaration but does outline a process whereby government departments will be held accountable for including animal sentience in their deliberations and policies. On the issue of animal sentience, the EU included a declaration that animals were sentient in the treaty that governs the functioning of the EU ( Article 13) but did not develop a process for enforcing the declaration. The United Kingdom’s animal sentience legislative approach is different from that adopted by the EU. On April 28, 2022, the United Kingdom (UK) Government bill stating that animals are sentient received Royal Assent from Queen Elizabeth, meaning that the bill is now an Act, the law of the land. The Government promised to do so and eventually developed an Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill to take the place of the EU language.

This omission prompted public dismay that animals would no longer have the protection of the EU declaration that they were sentient beings and led to a campaign calling on the Government to correct the omission. In particular, the issue of animal sentience was omitted. As expected, the very complicated omnibus EU-departure legislation did not address all the “gap” issues. The Conservative Government had promised to address the complicated range of legislative gaps, including the declaration that animals are sentient beings, that would be precipitated by the UK’s departure from the EU via new omnibus legislation. The UK government had to pass new laws covering the many items in EU legislation that would no longer apply to the UK, including the statement in the EU governing treaty that animals were sentient. When the UK (United Kingdom) voted to leave the European Union (EU), one of the consequences would be the loss of legislation on various issues covered in existing EU laws.

Octopus sentience