Get Up to Speed on Animals at the Sentience Mosaic

Many of us who care about animals haven’t actually studied animal science in school and don’t necessarily have a lot of expertise on the current state of research about animals. We just know enough to recognize cruelty and injustice when we see it — it doesn’t take a PhD to know that putting a pig in a gestation crate causes horrific suffering and is just plain immoral. This is not rocket science.
That being said, increasing our knowledge about animals is always helpful to their cause. The more we know, the better we advocate. That’s why I am so excited about the Sentience Mosaic, which is an amazing website developed by the World Society for the Protection of Animals as part of its more global open-source website,  Animal Mosaic.
Gathered together on the Sentience Mosaic is a plethora of resources that will help you understand more and more about animals, and that, in turn, will help you make the world a better place for them. And while the website is designed primarily for professionals in the field of animal studies, there is plenty on it for those of us whose interest in animals is maybe not our profession, but definitely is our passion.
The resources available on the site are video, audio and written. Just a quick glimpse will turn up lots of stuff you will be eager to spend time on, including such things as a video on animal grief, an audio piece on the inner lives of animals with Jonathan Balcombe, a scholarly study on whether crabs feel pain, and a transcript of a debate on  whether non-endangered animals in zoos are there just for our entertainment, etc., etc., etc.
Fair warning. While much of what is on this website is flat out wonderful, don’t expect to agree with everything you hear on this site (such as a talk by industry apologist Temple Grandin), and prepare to be disturbed by some of the research methodologies that were used to gather this information. This is education, and one of the things we need to educate ourselves about is why so many people who know a lot about animals don’t seem to think it’s wrong to exploit them in brutal, completely unnecessary ways. But, in spite of these issues, there is no doubt that there is a great deal to be learned here, in both accessible and academic ways, both about non-human animals and the humans who mistreat them.