All of Daniela R. Waldhorn's Comments + Replies

Hi Ula! I agree with you. I myself stopped working directly as an animal advocate after being mobbed, harassed, and listening to regular discriminatory comments for being a woman, an immigrant, and because of my origin. I've seen so many activists going through the same.

In my case, the continued support of other advocates, especially of the Encompass community (www.encompassmovement.org), has been invaluable. I highly recommend it.

Second, I also believe that it's time to stop normalizing activists' mistreatment and discriminatory practices, especially in o... (read more)

Thanks for pointing this out, Ula. I'm aware that several activists in other organizations have also suffered similar situations, along with derogatory comments because of their origin and gender.

Hey Lewis!

1. What kind of work would you like to see done for invertebrates?
2. What kind of work would you like to see done for animals living in the wild?
3. Are there key research questions that you think would contribute to advance these two areas' tractability?

Thanks!

Hi Tobias!

Thanks for commenting. That's a very interesting question. Probably, after the pandemic, people may be more concerned about safer and healthier food, and more open to messages about public costs and other problems associated with animal farming. But for now, this is just a hypothesis that should be empirically tested, as Peter says.

However, I disagree with the idea that coronavirus doesn't have anything to do with animal farming. There is extensive evidence about how factory farms provide an ideal breeding ground for highly pathogenic ... (read more)

Interesting, thank you!

Thanks for your comment, adamShimi! Do you have a sense of the profile of people that find eating snails disgusting? I wonder if it's a generational issue, for example. In Spain, eating snails now seems to be much more prevalent among older generations than among the youngest population.

Hey Julia! I partially address that point in the section that Linch indicated. As you say, whether snails have a capacity for valenced experience is still uncertain. When compared to bivalves, snails have more diverse and specialized sensory organs. As snails are motile and active foragers, they display a wider range of behaviors, and that is reflected in greater neural complexity. For instance, snails show nociceptive responses, like avoidance behavior in response to high temperatures (not surprisingly, several sources that provide instructions for cookin... (read more)

Hi!

Although the possession of nociceptors is perhaps some evidence of a capacity to feel pain, it is certainly not by itself "a good indicator" of that capacity. If nociceptors are not connected to centralized information-processing structures, these neurons could trigger reflexive reactions (i.e., similar to spinally mediated responses in mammals), but that would not imply that the nociceptive input is consciously perceived (in humans, see Becker et al., 2012; Dubin & Patapoutian, 2010). If we understand consciousness as suitably integrated ... (read more)

I applied to RP when I decided to make an important change in my career. If RP hadn't hired me, I'd have kept trying it at different EA organizations, maybe as an intern. Yet, I would likely have ended up working in a management position at a local NGO.

Yes, now I'm more careful while walking outside.
After our research on invertebrates, I also placed a net in some windows at home, and I purposefully keep them closed as long as possible to prevent any flying insects from visiting us and being "welcomed" by my cats.

I do think that the chances of bivalves being sentient are quite low. However, I do not eat them because I'm already used to a plant-based diet, and given our uncertainty, I adhere to the precautionary principle in this case.

In general, I would not recommend consuming marine invertebrates produced in countries where trawling is not banned, given its impact on other aquatic animals for whom there is a high probability that they are sentient (i.e., fish and other vertebrates).

Still, I'm unsure about the consequences of promoting bivalve consumption... (read more)

I agree with Jason. Additionally, I probably wouldn't be a researcher if I didn't work for an organization like RP because of operational costs, security/risk, and well-being reasons. But more importantly, since I'm at an early stage of my career as a researcher, if I worked independently, I wouldn't count on the support of my team and researchers with more experience. That would make it very difficult for me to improve and develop professionally as a researcher.

¡Gracias por tu interés y tu colaboración, Mati!

Thank you for your interest and collaboration, Mati!

Thanks!

Good question about repellants. Indeed, if food were the limiting factor, repellants would be much more effective. But in agricultural lands, crops constitute a superabundant source of potential food. In these landscapes, invertebrates like some insects or snails do not seem to be mainly limited by the amount of available food –instead, access to quality feed appears to be a matter of greater importance.

Therefore, deterring insects typically move off on to a new crop, where they do not necessarily compete for food, and their populations can ... (read more)

Hi Tobias!

Thanks for your interest and your stimulating feedback. In general, I think that people do not have an elaborated position about these issues. But we are typically resistant to ideas that conflict with our beliefs, and, as you say, if one rationalization does not work, in all probability, we will make up a new excuse in order to dismiss a "troubling" or "crazy" position.

Unfortunately, there is no direct evidence about this specific effect in how we morally think about invertebrates. In fact, the psychological barriers here de... (read more)

Hi Tobias!

Thanks again for sharing your views. Regarding the role of further research, first, we should keep in mind that the scientific literature in invertebrate sentience is still scarce, and the extent to which invertebrates have been investigated varies. Thus, there are some particular species about which there is a comparatively great deal of knowledge (e.g., fruit flies). But for several other taxa, potentially consciousness-indicating features have not been investigated at all. It is unknown if many invertebrate taxa display particular anatomical, ... (read more)

Hi Tobias!

Thanks for commenting. You're right. All else equal, smaller organisms or those with less intense experiences may have relatively less positive and negative experiences. However, since smaller individuals are typically r-selected, while they can suffer in large numbers, they usually live relatively short lives. Thus, two shifts happen –one of which drives the net balance of suffering up, and the other which drives the net balance of suffering down:

• First, as the more organisms in a species fail, the more cases of suffering there are r

You're right! Thanks for your feedback, Max Daniel! We'll correct that shortly.

Hey Max! Thanks for your feedback and for your vital contribution to this project. Sorry I couldn't get back to you before –I had taken a few days off.

The example you provide fits well in what I classified as "sophisticated information processing functions that can be performed unconsciously". Of course we can come up with creative ideas after a period of conscious thought, but it doesn't necessarily happen that way. As you describe, unconscious processes play an important role in achieving creative insights, during what is called &qu... (read more)

Thanks for your enriching comment, Gavin. Just wanted to add to Jason's response that, unfortunately, there is no consensus on whether various features potentially indicative of consciousness would be adaptive for any conscious individual, regardless of a species' evolutionary history and its adaptive needs.

Complicating things even further, we do not even have such thing as a 'universal' intelligence measuring instrument for humans–cultural differences in intelligence determine results country by country. The above points out that we n... (read more)

Thanks again for your valuable comments and suggestions, Gavin! I'll definitely dig deeper into those aspects you point out.

Hi MichaelStJules! We'll consider that paper for a clarificatory commentary on this. Thanks again for your suggestions!

Hi MichaelStJules. Thanks again for your valuable suggestions! We will publicly share our plans to update /expand this database. Additionally, in upcoming posts we aim to outline the current state of improving invertebrate welfare as a cause area and suggest possible next steps in this regard.

Hi, gavintaylor. Thanks for your comment. Research in patients with vegetative or minimally consciousness states –different from dementia or delirium, which should be better described as acute disturbances in consciousness– would probably shed some light on this matter. However, this area of research might be challenging by itself.

Disorders of consciousness are heterogeneous, and judging the level of actual awareness has proved a complicated process. Traditional tests and observations have been criticized since they require some level of subjective interp... (read more)

Hi JoshYou. Thanks for your very pertinent comment.

We are aware of the possibility of hidden qualia. It is a valuable hypothesis. Nevertheless, we found no empirical evidence to support it, at least in the literature on invertebrate sentience. If you will, you can view our project as a compilation and analysis of the existing evidence about the sentience of individual invertebrate organisms, as opposed to subroutines within those systems. Under this reading, what we call ‘unconscious processes’ would be understood as processes which are inaccessible to the... (read more)

Hi MichaelStJules!

For now, (1) the table is not downloadable. Regarding (3), in various cases, we use the taxon or the species name to highlight that existing evidence only applies to that specific species. Thus, generalizing from a single species to the rest of the taxon or higher taxonomic ranks is potentially problematic –primarily when an invertebrate category comprises a large group of species, as is the case with ants.

Thank you for your suggestions. We will take them into account to improve our work.

We were aware of that study, thanks for sharing it!

However, that paper is published by a potentially predatory journal, and no further evidence on this matter was found. Hence, we maintain our current response (‘unknown’), but will introduce a clarificatory commentary mentioning this study and its reliability limitations.