(Text from The Most Dangerous Game, Richard Connell, 1924)

Always remember: The reason “sapient” (able to think) and “sentient” (able to feel) are treated like synonyms? is because it used to be considered common sense that both Emotion and Reasoning were things only humans could do, in the whole animal kingdom.

And the reason both those words are now of very limited usefulness? is because anyone who thinks about it enough can now understand that reasoning, like emotion, is a spectrum. There’s not some clear line between Dumb Animals that can’t do those things, and Enlightened People that can.

The living world is full of creatures that have at least some of both. The only way to deny this is to ignore all evidence in the similarity of biology and behavior, and imagine that’s all just put there to test your faith, and that God made all the animals mindless automata to serve him and us.

That used to be a common belief. Luckily it’s dying out.

Where you draw the line, for stuff like “enough emotion and reason that I don’t feel comfortable killing and eating it,” is up to you and the society you live in. I’m not gonna judge, and I’m not gonna pretend it’s possible to live without harming any other life forms.

But you’re lying to yourself if you think it’s easy to know for sure how much any other being can feel and think. Or if you tell yourself that Emotion and Reason are safe little solid-walled boxes that contain only “you and others enough like you.”

Definitions in general don’t work like that. And especially those ones.