Should (and Can) Declarations on Animal Consciousness Do Better?
What Comes After Recognition? If Declarations Do Nothing, They Do Harm
On 11 March 2025, Liv Baker, PhD — a fellow and board member of PAN Works — participated in a George Washington University Animal Law Program webinar on the adequacy of the recent NY Declaration on Animal Consciousness. The first speaker is Jeff Sebo, PhD, one of the authors of the NY Declaration. The seminar was moderated by Lori Marino, PhD, who along with Kathy Hessler, JD, is the Co-Director of the Animal Law & Science Program at GWU.
The fellows of PAN Works have addressed the NY Declaration several times in this Medium, as well as an article in the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics. Below, are Liv’s powerful opening comments, as well as the youtube video of the entire seminar. Liv’s remarks start at ~16:45 minutes into the recording.
These remarks have been lightly edited for publication.
Many thanks to Lori and Kathy for the invitation to participate in this conversation, and thank you all for being here.
I want to begin with a simple yet urgent question:
What is the purpose of declaring that animals are conscious?
Declarations like the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness affirm what science, ethics, and lived experience have long confirmed: that many animals experience the world in ways that matter to them.
But if these declarations do not demand change — if they do not call for the abolition of practices that deny animals the ability to live on their own terms — then what are they really doing?
Because if the answer is nothing, or if they merely lead to minor refinements in how we exploit these beings, then these declarations do more harm than good.
Rather than serving as catalysts for change, they become instruments of complicity. They acknowledge sentience while continuing to permit practices that violate it. They recognize the capacity for suffering while allowing suffering to persist. We see this contradiction everywhere:
- We acknowledge that pigs are cognitively and emotionally complex, yet we intensively confine them, deny them social relationships, and systematically kill them in slaughterhouses.
- We acknowledge that octopuses are intelligent, capable of problem-solving and experiencing distress, yet we are building octopus farms to mass-produce them for human consumption.
- We acknowledge that monkeys and mice experience pain and fear, and express empathy, yet we subject them to invasive experiments that inflict and violate precisely those experiences.
These declarations do not disrupt human dominance over other beings — they reaffirm it.
Recognition Without Protection is an Endorsement of Harm
The New York Declaration claims that when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, we must not ignore that possibility. And yet, in practice, that is exactly what we do — constantly, institutionally, and often without consequence.
- We acknowledge that fishes feel pain, yet we drag them from the water to suffocate or cut them apart while they are fully aware.
- We acknowledge that elephants and other social animals build relationships and pass on cultural traditions, yet we isolate them in enclosures, severing the very connections that define their lives — breaking their family structures, their histories, and their ways of knowing the world.
- We acknowledge that primates and rodents experience complex emotions, yet we inject them with diseases, restrain them, and deprive them in laboratories of control over their own bodies.
- We acknowledge that birds, reptiles, and even insects engage in sophisticated decision-making, yet we destroy the environments that support their ability to make choices at all.
What these contradictions reveal is that recognition without action does not challenge harm — it sustains it.
Instead of leading to the end of invasive research, captivity, and exploitation, these declarations provide ethical cover for these very same practices.
They allow us to refine, regulate, and perpetuate harm under the illusion of progress.
If we are serious about animal consciousness, then we must be serious about what it demands of us.
And that means challenging the systems that violate it — not rebranding them as more ethical or ethically aware.
It is not just pain we must reckon with — it is the theft of joy, the loss of meaningful choices, the silencing of voices in their own lives. It is the stripping away of exploration, curiosity, pleasure, play, and belonging.
To recognize consciousness while refusing to respect what that consciousness makes possible — the relationships, the desires, the agency, the right to experience a full and rich life — is not recognition at all. It is a performance.
Consciousness is Not an Isolated Trait — It Emerges from a Network of Knowing
If we are serious about recognizing animal consciousness, we must also change how we attempt to know it.
For too long, the study of animal cognition has been reductionist — treating behaviors as discrete markers or indicators, rather than as expressions by whole animals of complex, integrated ways of knowing and being.
- A chimp passing the mirror test.
- A crow using a tool.
- A fish avoiding a noxious stimulus.
Science too often reduces intelligence to singular demonstrations, focusing on whether an animal can pass a human-designed test instead of recognizing how intelligence manifests across the entirety of their lived experience.
But cognition, like wellbeing, is not a simple measure. It is an emergent state — arising not from isolated behaviors but from the dynamic interactions among environment, relationships, learning, and agency. Wellbeing — like consciousness — does not exist in a vacuum. It emerges through a network of interconnected dimensions.
This is Why I Developed the Spheres of Wellbeing Framework
The Spheres of Wellbeing framework offers a structured approach that fundamentally shifts how we understand animal knowledge and expression. This framework challenges traditional scientific approaches and asks us to consider how animals perceive, know, and express themselves through their behavioral choices not as isolated actions, but as demonstrations of complex integration among spatial knowledge, memory, social awareness, anticipation, and individual preference.
Their understanding of and response to the world aren’t compartmentalized but exist as a unified way of knowing that informs every choice and interaction. Each sphere — from environmental engagement to cultural transmission, from emotional expression to knowledge acquisition — influences and is influenced by the others, creating a dynamic system of experience and expression.
This transforms our approach to wellbeing assessment.
We must understand how animals themselves perceive and evaluate their experiences, how they create meaning from their interactions, and how they understand their own autonomy.
For animals let’s consider:
• Their Physical health and safety — How they experience and respond to bodily states and vulnerabilities.
• Their Environmental engagement — Their ability to interact with and understand one’s surroundings.
• Their Social connection and culture — Their relationships, traditions, and shared knowledge that shape experience.
• Their Knowledge acquisition and learning — How their memory, experience, and observation guide their decision-making.
• Their Emotional expression — How affective states shape and are shaped by their lived experience.
• Their Self-determination and agency — Their ability to make meaningful choices about one’s own life.
The Burden of Proof is Always on the Animal — And That’s the Problem
When we acknowledge that wellbeing arises through these interconnected dimensions, we must also recognize how our scientific and ethical frameworks fail to account for them. Instead of appreciating animals as whole beings, science continues to impose narrow, human-centered standards — demanding that animals prove their intelligence, emotions, or capacity for suffering and joy through tests designed for human expectations. And for many species, this burden of proof is impossibly high.
But the problem runs even deeper. These declarations also perpetuate and also reinforce a scientific and moral poverty — one that demands animals constantly prove their worth.
Acknowledging the Past Doesn’t Mean We Need to Perpetuate Its Harms
Science does not exist in a moral vacuum. The knowledge we have today — about animal cognition, consciousness, and behavior — has been shaped by histories of exploitation, colonization, and subjugation, both of human and nonhuman beings. The methods that built the foundations of ethology, psychology, and neuroscience have often been extractive, invasive, and dismissive of the autonomy of their subjects. To acknowledge this reality is not to excuse it.
Recognition of this past does not grant us permission to be relativistic about the present, nor does it absolve us of responsibility for what comes next. Instead, it demands that we interrogate the frameworks that allowed such harm to be normalized and ensure that our continued pursuit of knowledge does not perpetuate the same cycles of complicity and complacency.
We stand on ground that was shaped by systems of domination — of both people and animals. This awareness does not bind us to those systems; it compels us to dismantle them. To say that we benefit from knowledge obtained through unethical means is not an argument for perpetuating those means. It is a call to do better — to push science beyond its extractive traditions and toward a model that is rooted in respect, reciprocity, and ethical imagination.
If we claim to be guided by truth, then we must recognize that truth-seeking cannot come at the cost of those whose lives we study. Ethical science is not an obstacle to progress; it is the only legitimate form of progress.
We have demanded that animals prove their sentience, their cognitive complexity, their capacity for suffering, their social and emotional worlds — again and again.
And even as declarations expand this recognition to include more beings — fishes, cephalopods, insects — they still reinforce the same flawed premise: that only when science grants approval do these animals deserve moral standing.
But this is not a pursuit of knowledge. This is a gatekeeping mechanism that serves human interests.
And this is not just a failure of science — it is an ethical failure. To force other animals to prove their worth while we continue to harm them regardless of the evidence is not a pursuit of knowledge; it is an excuse to delay moral reckoning.
Consciousness is not an abstract puzzle to be solved — it is an ethical demand. And yet, we have treated it as if it is nothing more than an academic exercise, rather than a call to action.
Consciousness is an Ethical Demand, Not an Academic Debate
This gatekeeping is a way of managing moral obligations rather than reckoning with them. It is a way of maintaining control over other beings by continuously raising the threshold for who counts.
The failures of these declarations go beyond inaction, they limit our ethical imagination and actively exclude other beings from being known on their own terms.
And the species most often dismissed — the ones forced to clear the highest bar — are often invertebrates.
Let’s think about jumping spiders, for example. Jumping spiders plan routes in advance, adjusting their movements based on spatial reasoning, memory, and problem-solving. They construct mental maps of their surroundings, choosing paths that bypass obstacles and reduce risk — decisions that require foresight, not mere instinct.
Now consider an elephant navigating a fragmented landscape. She pauses. She scents the air. She assesses the terrain. She is not just moving — she is deciding. She draws upon memory, social knowledge, past experience. She knows where she is, where she has been, and where she is going.
These two species — a spider weighing a fraction of a gram, an elephant weighing thousands of kilograms — are both engaged in deliberate, self-determined decision-making in their lives. Neither species is engaged in a single cognitive act. Their decisions reflect a network of knowing, shaped by memory, experience, and an understanding of self in relation to place, time, and others.
Yet, because spider cognition does not manifest in ways easily recognizable to us, it is largely excluded from conversations about consciousness.
And because elephant intelligence has been so thoroughly documented, we exploit it under the guise of admiration — placing them in enclosures, managing their movements, deciding for them when they will migrate, whom they will associate with, and what their futures will look like.
If we want to know them — truly know them — we need to be scientifically and ethically creative.
We Must Move Beyond Extraction and Toward Scientific Creativity
Understanding animal consciousness requires more than extracting knowledge — it requires a willingness to learn from animals in ways that do not distort or diminish them.
This means:
- Seeing animals as agents of their own lives — not objects in controlled settings, but individuals shaping their own futures.
- Developing non-invasive frameworks that allow us to observe them in natural, non-exploitative settings, respecting their autonomy rather than forcing them into artificial conditions.
- Recognizing their intelligence on their terms, not ours — understanding that awareness, problem-solving, and decision-making emerge through interaction with their environment, with others, with time.
We already have ways to do this. There are ethical, non-invasive methods that allow us to study animals without reducing them to test subjects.
But instead of prioritizing these approaches, we continue to justify harmful, outdated methods that strip animals of their autonomy in the name of research.
If we are to claim to care about knowing these beings, then we must first recognize our ethical responsibility in how we come to know them.
Being in Right Relation is A Transformative Ethical Path Forward
If declarations are to mean anything, they must move beyond recognition to right relation.
Being in right relation means recognizing that animals are not objects of study, not resources to be managed, but sovereign beings — individuals with their own ways of knowing, their own communities, their own cultures.
When we speak of elephant consciousness, it is not merely an abstract fact — it is a reality lived in social relationships, in cultural traditions passed across generations, in choices made about where to go, with whom to be, and how to move through their world. When we deprive them of these choices, we do not simply “limit their welfare” — we destroy their very ability to exist as themselves.
And the same is true across species. Whether it is fishes navigating the currents with generational knowledge, cephalopods solving problems through embodied intelligence, or insects communicating in complex social systems — each of these beings inhabits a world rich with experience. To strip them of the ability to live within those worlds is to commit an ongoing and systemic violation.
Declarations Must Demand More
Recognition alone is meaningless unless it translates into right action. If we truly understand consciousness as an ethical demand, then the next step is clear: we must take that recognition out of academic debates and policy papers and embed it into law, into protections, into the fundamental restructuring of how we interact with other beings.
If declarations are to have any legitimacy, they must:
- Move beyond acknowledgment to abolition. We cannot claim to recognize consciousness while continuing practices that deny it.
- They must Integrate into law and policy. Scientific and ethical recognition must translate into enforceable protections.
- They must reject the exclusionary framework of human-defined thresholds. The burden of proof should not be on animals to demonstrate cognitive phenomena beyond doubt — it should be on us to justify every act that constrains, manipulates, or harms them.
This is a Moment of Reckoning
Anything less than this is not progress — it is stagnation. We cannot continue pretending that small adjustments to exploitative systems are enough. We must choose between the comfort of half-measures and the courage to fundamentally transform our relationship with other beings.
This is a moment of reckoning.
We can continue producing declarations that claim to recognize animal consciousness while perpetuating the very systems that violate it. Or we can demand more — more of science, of policy, and of ourselves.
Because to acknowledge that another being is conscious while continuing to deny them their autonomy is not just ethically incoherent — It is morally and scientifically indefensible.
Thank you. I look forward to our discussion.
