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/ July 15th, 2006, 11:51 pm / You know, whats interesting about this whole dussicsion is the concept that sentience does indeed confer rights. While I agree with you, I think you'd find many people, religious or otherwise, who would argue that sentience alone is not enough to deserve rights. For millenia, indeed up until the 19th and 20th centuries, it was consciousness, not sentience, that defined rights arguments. Earlier thinkers on animal cruelty used arguments based on the connection between animals and humans, not on animals standalone rights (such as Pythagoras, probably one of the oldest to defend rights for animals, and strictly because he believed in the transmigration of human souls to animals, not because of any inherent value in animals themselves). The point is that you may find it a hard sell, even to this day, to get people to accept sentience as the basis for bringing animals into the moral sphere people have been trying for years, with limited success.Sorry to be so pessimistic! -olly