Thank you, Tommy.

Sentience seems to be on a continuum, and we really don’t know about animals like oysters. For a time, it was thought that oysters weren’t sentient and so there was no problem with eating them from a vegan perspective, though there were concerns about vegans eating them simply because it would appear inconsistent and there isn’t the opportunity to explain the relevance of sentience to everyone all the time. Veganism is usually described as not harming animals, but really only sentient animals are relevant. If someone has a taste for sponges, I don’t care if they eat them all day long. Sponges are animals but they aren’t conscious and don’t feel. More recent evidence does show that oysters may feel some pain, but nothing like that of a rabbit or pig or chicken.

I agree that focusing on our ability to empathize is a problem. That can lead to people dismissing animals with vastly different ways of experiencing the world, like octopuses, who are pretty clearly sentient. It can also lead to a greater emphasis on defending “cute” or “smart” animals.

I know that a lot of arguments defending animals focus on how intelligent they are, but intelligence is not an important factor in animal sentience. I think there is some value, though, in broad comparisons of animals with centralized nervous systems. Most scientists agree that vertebrates tend to suffer similarly. But I don’t think that because dogs are more like humans and are smarter than cats, the suffering of cats matters less, or because pigs are smarter than cows, the suffering of cows matter less. And while smarter animals may be able to suffer in different ways (psychological ones), that doesn’t mean that the worst pain a smarter animal can suffer is worse than the worst pain of a less intelligent one.

I wrote a post about animal sentience in case you’re interested. https://steemit.com/philosophy/@goose/animals-as-persons-what-s-sentience-got-to-do-with-it

There is a small but vocal minority of vegans who think that people who eat animals are just bad people. I half understand where they’re coming from because to those of us who are “early adopters” of veganism, something just clicked, and we realized how horrific it is. It just seems objectively wrong if we care about the suffering of others. And it’s easy to get angry and frustrated that so many others so nonchalantly view animals as resources. But any vegan who is willing to stop and think about it for 30 seconds will realize that if non-vegans were bad people, that means that just about everyone they know and care about it is a bad person. That means 99% of the people in the northern hemisphere are just bad people. It doesn’t make any sense. The normalization of animal abuse is a social problem.

I don’t want to work with people who would view you as a monster, either, and neither would most vegans. At the same time, I don’t agree that we should be encouraging people to eat less meat. I think we should be asking people to think about the reasons to respect other animals and to care about their pain and suffering. And I think that will eventually lead to people seeing animals so differently that they don’t want to eat any meat at all.

If you’re on Facebook, you might like the Animal Ethics page: https://www.facebook.com/Animal-Ethics-1424658461139957/