Knowing Suffering

Abstract

Thus far in the book, it has been presumed that animal suffering can be both defined and detected with relative ease. However, not everybody agrees. One argument is that animal suffering is, in fact, both extremely difficult (if not impossible) to define, and that we can never know for sure whether an animal suffers. This sceptical take on animal suffering gains its foothold from the inherently subjective nature of suffering: suffering is a subjectively experienced state which escapes objective definitions and verifications, particularly when the species barrier is crossed. Matilda will never know what it is like to be a bat or a chicken, and she should therefore, perhaps, cease talking of ‘animal suffering’ as a knowable entity. Are the critics correct?