Sentience stands in contexts, do you poke into the functionalities of a beings nervous system to analyze the “quality” of their sentience, then you set the standard with human notions of what they treat as neurologically relevant sentience, or do you understand that all interaction between nonhuman animal life and the natural environment is an interaction marked by sentience, by physical interaction on endlessly complex and fragile levels, which would be the kind of sentience/s you can’t fit into the idea humans normally hold about their own cognition as “higher” – then you step into the hierarchical conflict zones of “human” self-definition.

Sentience indicates the intricate connectedness of life. You can’t easily open a door for a human defined “standard” side of sentience, while closing a door to other facts and phenomenons of sentience and be eco-ethically and antispeciesistically fair.

Establishing a language of “right, dignity and integrity” in terms of nonhuman animals should in my point of view be a venture of highlighting interrelatedness, of a lot of differentialization work amongst social and ethical-ecological fields and of creating new spaces of thinking.