The Christmas Island pipistrelle was a tiny bat the size of a prune that lived only on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. It had once been a common sight, darting through the night air acrobatically as it fed on insects. But in the late 1980s it began to decline as a result of predation by introduced species. On 26 August 2009, the last remaining Christmas Island pipistrelle was heard one final time, at exactly 38 seconds past 11.29pm; after that, silence.
The date on which this bat went extinct was my 23rd birthday. It was bizarre, realising I could remember exactly what I’d been doing the moment an entire species vanished on the other side of the planet. Scrolling back through social media, even more of that day came together: what I’d eaten, who I’d been with, the weather. Extinction, a phenomenon that can feel so distant and divorced from our lives, suddenly felt personal and immediate.
If you aren’t yet worried about the multitude of ways you inadvertently inflict suffering onto other living creatures, you will be after reading The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch. And for good reason. Birch, a Professor of Philosophy at the London College of Economics and Political Science, was one of a team of experts chosen by the UK government to establish the Animal Welfare Act (or Sentience Act) in 2022—a law that protects animals whose sentience status is unclear.
According to Birch, even insects may possess sentience, which he defines as the capacity to have valenced experiences, or experiences that feel good or bad. At the very least, Birch explains, insects (as well as all vertebrates and a selection of invertebrates) are sentience candidates: animals that may be conscious and, until proven otherwise, should be regarded as such.
What went wrong? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think, and it’s impossible to answer that question without looking at how the Honeycrisp apple came about—and how it shot to stardom so quickly.
I discussed the situation with Gefen. I don’t know how to write a car review, but I’ve watched a lot of “Top Gear,” so Gefen and I pondered what possible “Top Gear”-style stunts I might undertake with my Buzz—a limited set of possibilities, given that Jeremy Clarkson and I are made of different stuff. We decided we ought to race my Buzz against his Sonett, even though my Buzz has two hundred and eighty-two horsepower and his Sonett has sixty-five, and my Buzz can go from zero to sixty in something like six seconds, while his Sonett, he admits, “can’t get to sixty.”