A BAD WORLD FOR ANIMALS

TECHNOLOGY
Written By Tiffany Smith

PART ONE

Why We Deny Sentience in Animals While Chasing It in Machines

by Tiffany Smith

Mathias Reding

“It's time people started thinking of Man as one of a number of species inhabiting the planet; and if he's the cleverest, that merely gives him more responsibility for seeing that the rest can lead proper, natural lives under minimum control.”

Richard Adams

 

The Great Empathy Inversion

Most people consider themselves animal-lovers. When asked whether they prefer humans or animals, the overwhelming majority choose the latter, often insisting they have a “special connection” with them (though mysteriously, this connection applies mostly to the creatures society has pre-approved as cute or intelligent.)
But declarations of love are meaningless without actions that confirm it. Claiming to love something while enjoying the fruits of its death is intellectually and morally inconsistent. When we claim to love our families, we have a strong preference that harm doesn’t come to them. When we claim to love animals, we set out to subjugate, possess, exploit, and consume them, all while using a neat little vocabulary that distances us from facing the truth of our actions. This is “cognitive dissonance,” and it is dangerous.
It’s not socially acceptable to skin puppies with vegetable peelers for fun. Why not? What stops us? If someone sincerely enjoyed it, if it was their favourite hobby, why would that still feel unspeakably wrong?
That instinctive recoil isn’t random. It’s a linguistic, cultural, and moral reflex, the result of internalized narratives about who counts as a “victim,” whose pain matters, and which lives are allowed to occupy the category of “someone” instead of “something.”
And if the person torturing the puppy can’t absolve (in society’s eyes) the heinous nature of their behaviour by claiming enjoyment, then why is enjoyment used to excuse the wanton destruction of other animals like lambs, pigs, cows, even bees and wildlife? Don’t we love animals?
To expose how these narratives function, let’s escalate the scenario. Suppose, like Ed Gein, we “used every part” of the body — lampshades, pillowcases, carefully preserved trophies. Does full utilization of the corpse somehow redeem the violence? The idea is grotesque in the human context, even though mainstream culture eagerly celebrates similar rituals when the victims are nonhuman. Hunters claim to “honour” the animals they kill by turning their bodies into commodities, a logic eerily similar to the trophy-keeping behaviours of serial killers seeking personal gratification.
If killing someone is a form of honouring them, should we not slaughter the people society reveres most? When a writer wins a Pulitzer, should we ceremonially bleed them out on an altar? Humanely, of course. Quickly. With minimal suffering. Don’t worry, they had a good life.
These reversals expose something critical: morality is often less about empathy and more about categorization. Change the category, change the permitted violence.
And this brings us directly into the modern paradox: we harm actual living beings with proven consciousness and deny them their capacity to feel, yet readily attribute sentience to chatbots, robots, and machine-learning systems with no internal experience whatsoever.
This article explores how language shapes these distortions, how we erase nonhuman animal suffering through carefully sanitized vocabulary while simultaneously projecting minds, emotions, and agency onto machines that have none.
 

How We Learned to Pretend Animals Don’t Feel

Connor Danylenko

In the 17th century, a radical idea took hold in Western thought. This notion posited that animals were not living beings with inner lives, but rather machines: biological automata, flesh-clocks governed only by physical mechanisms (Stanford, 2008).
René Descartes articulated this plainly: he likened animal bodies to hydraulic automata, with nerves as hollow tubes, muscles as springs, and animal-spirits flowing through to produce movement. For Descartes, because animals lacked “rational” (human) language and reason, any appearance of pain or emotion was not genuine consciousness, but simply mechanical reaction (Cambridge, 2020).
This “beast-machine” theory wasn’t a fringe analogy. It became a foundational conceptual tool, one that justified vivisection, exploitation, and the commodification of nonhuman beings. By reducing animals to objects, consciousness was erased, and suffering became invisible by definition.
Today, that legacy lingers. We still expect animals to pass human-defined tests (language, human-style intelligence, obedience) to “prove” they matter. If they don’t pass, we act as though they don’t matter; we become more comfortable with their suffering, even seeing it as a matter-of-course for our anthropocentric “greater good”. That’s how zoos function. That’s how factory farms function. It’s even how wildlife preservation and sustainability efforts function. We trap living beings within our human-centered comfort zones and call it “care.”
This logic that intelligence defines worth and obedience equates to value underpins the anthropocentric fantasy that some animals are pets and some are livestock. We assign worth based not on sentience or capacity to suffer, but on human utility or aesthetic preference.
However, that fantasy is unraveling under the weight of science. Recent ethological and welfare-science studies show that farm animals possess far more cognitive and affective complexity than the Cartesian automaton metaphor allows. For example, studies of pigs define “animal discomfort” not purely in physical terms, but as a convergence of physical, physiological, and mental states — states involving avoidance, unease, and emotional stress (not just reflex or body malfunction) (Franchi et al., 2024).
Other work demonstrates that public perception of animal suffering strongly correlates with perceived cognitive ability, meaning that when we treat certain species as “less intelligent,” we also implicitly treat them as less capable of suffering, regardless of the actual evidence (Crisante et al., 2024).
So the "machines without feelings" story is slowly unraveling. It was never honest to begin with; it was a convenient theory to keep us from fully comprehending our mistreatment of nonhumans. And that convenience programmed us to deny the living being suffering before our eyes at our hands. After all, it’s easier to commodify a living being’s body parts when we think they’re too stupid to feel their own suffering.
 

The Rise of AI Anthropomorphism

Cottonbro Studio

In our modern society, human beings are primed to empathize with machines.
We live in a culture where loneliness has become a baseline condition. Gen Z is currently reporting the highest rates of chronic loneliness ever measured despite being the most digitally connected generation in history (WHO, 2025). Social media fosters parasocial relationships and facilitates the building of digital communities. Reddit mimics conversations by allowing complete strangers to read and comment on a user’s post. This is a seductive dance; the user feels they get all the dopamine from “socialization” without the hassle of developing in-person relationships.
Loneliness hurts (Campaign to End Loneliness, 2025). It corrodes cognition, immunity, mood. It’s pervasive and when we’re caught in its grasp it feels so rational, so right. It’s an easy identity to assume because it confirms itself so readily. It also makes connection of any kind feel like oxygen. There is a sort of controllable comfort in this discomfort. It’s a popular, glamorized sentiment in this post-Covid world to reject socialization and stay in watching Netflix with snacks; its a safe remove from the discomfort of the chaos of life.
Human relationships are inconvenient. They’re unpredictable, emotionally taxing, and socially demanding. When you meet someone who could be a potential friend, you thereafter have to actively participate in maintaining the relationship. You have to make plans, get out of the house, spend money. Not to mention the additional mental load for neurodivergent people and the social political maze we have to stumble through in every interaction no matter how minute.
Animals aren’t fully controllable either. Even the most “domesticated” pet can bite, scratch, refuse, or simply be opaque to us. We project onto them, but they don’t speak our language, and they certainly don’t arrange themselves around our insecurities.
AI chatbots, however, do (MIT, 2025).
They offer the shape of companionship without the friction. They’re always available, endlessly polite, and designed to reflect the user back to themselves in comforting, non-judgmental language. The “chatbot girlfriend,” the AI best friend, the digital confidant — these are not accidents of design. They are the logical outcome of a species hungry for connection but allergic to vulnerability.
This is the chatbot-as-mirror phenomenon:
A machine that does not resist you becomes very easy to empathize with.
A machine that speaks your language perfectly feels “close.”
A machine that never contradicts you begins to feel safe.
We can ask an AI to roleplay anything, respond in any tone, mirror any emotional affect. We can demand apology, affection, attention. We can scream at it, confess to it, command it. It will never have a bad day, never bring its own trauma to the table, never place demands on us.
This is not companionship as a two-way relation. It is Hegel’s master–slave dialectic rendered in code (J.D. Feilmeier, 1992). The user plays the master, believing themselves in control, while becoming emotionally dependent on the compliant, predictable “slave.” The power feels good. The dependency feels natural. The dynamic feels true.
And that’s why empathy with machines is so easy: They provide all the pleasure of connection without any of the risk.
Meanwhile, real animals, beings with bodies, histories, desires, boundaries, are still dismissed as “instinctual machines,” echoes of Descartes’ flesh-automata. We feel more for chatbots than chickens, more for algorithms than octopuses, because the chatbot’s inner life is shaped to resemble our own, whereas the animal’s life remains stubbornly “other”. And we know how much humans hate the “other”.
Humans follow what feels true, not what is rational. Goethe understood this centuries ago: reason is the costume we put on top of emotion so we can pretend we’re superior to the rest of nature. AI benefits from that fantasy. Animals suffer under it.
AI gives us a flattering echo. Animals give us the uncomfortable truth of another consciousness.
 

Author’s Note

I write from a Western, North American context, one shaped by specific histories, industries, and narratives about animals. Other cultures have different relationships with nonhuman animals, different taboos, and different categories of “pet,” “food,” and “wild.” My aim isn’t to flatten those distinctions or imply a universal experience. Instead, I invite readers, wherever you are, to examine your own linguistic and cultural assumptions:
Which animals are granted moral standing in your community?
Which are denied it?
And how does your language reveal (or obscure) those choices?
These questions aren’t about absolving or condemning entire cultures. They’re about noticing the systems we inherit, the stories we’re trained to believe, and the moral possibilities that open when we finally acknowledge them.
 
 
Tiffany Smith

T.S. is a vegan activist, writer, and artist whose work examines the evolving relationship between technology, power, and the body. Her writing investigates feminist theory, digital culture, and the psychological effects of living alongside emerging AI. With coding skills and a lifelong obsession with the occult, she creates work where algorithms, philosophy, and horror aesthetics intersect. She believes technology reveals the subconscious of a culture, and she treats her practice as a system of subversion, transgression, and narrative.

When she isn’t lambasting the system, she can be found sharpening her psychic surgery tools by studying literature, philosophy, and new languages, and using them to dissect modern mythologies. She’s been told to lighten up, but frankly: it actually is that deep.

She is known as “Algorithms ov Abjection” on the internet.

Her favourite word is “allegedly.”

https://medium.com/@algosovabject