The law is unique among change management tools. It functions on the concept of responsibility ("duty of care") for which there are accountabilities and potential liabilities.

The law mandates what's acceptable in terms of behaviour. It also shapes personal and public attitudes. But critically from a change management perspective, the law applies to everyone and has the power to deliver nationwide changes in people's behaviours because it is the only tool that can remove people’s money, property and freedoms if their behaviours don’t comply with legal requirements.

Working with outdated tools routinely results in inferior outcomes and law is no different. And it's true that the law is often slow to evolve. This frequently causes frustration and dismay to those who recognise that law prohibiting cruelty continues to classify many outdated procedures as ‘lawful’. While acknowledging the challenges of aligning multiple independent stakeholders with different agendas, the reality is that continuing to work with worn-out models governing the human-animal relationship will predictably undermine wider initiatives involving animals.

Law that's not up-to-date with the science of the Five Domains and the expectations of 'good practice' from a modern society implicitly endorses and perpetuates practices that (a) put the public at avoidable risk, (b) caps the potential of industry, and (c) fetters the ability to deliver on animal-related international undertakings involving climate change, biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance, and sustainability.

On the other hand, positive animal welfare law delivers laws that are consistent with the existing legal paradigm of almost every country in the world, the scientific knowledge of the Five Domains, and pragmatically workable with existing methods of compliance and enforcement.

So positive animal welfare law is a key ingredient to the success of SDG's and other programs that involve standards of animal welfare.

This is a critical point for those seeking to harness the power of the law to implement nationwide changes in behaviours: "Behaviours changes ONLY IF there is a clear and unequivocal change in law's duty of care".

Without a change in the duty of care, well-intended hopes and aspirations PREDICTABLY FAIL to result in meaningful, pragmatic change.

• For example, while the Treaty of Lisbon was enormously significant in elevating questions about what animals feel, it did NOT change the duty of care and consequently, Member States continued to behave on the basis of only anti-cruelty responsibilities.
• Similarly, countries whose law just explicitly or symbolically recognises animals as sentient observable fails to translate to meaningful change in the daily life experience of the animal - why? - because there was no shift in the duty of care beyond anti-cruelty.

Of the legal endeavours to deliver tangible behavioural changes that deliver real-world daily benefits to the life experience of animals and people, this 3-word law reform is the strongest, simplest and most effective. That's because it functions seamlessly within the current legal paradigm as an EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DUTY OF CARE (rather than encountering predictable barriers to alternatives like personhood, guardianship, or rights).

• Without this law reform, animals' lives continue to be benchmarked just by their justifiable suffering ("cruelty").
• Alternatively, we can update the rulebook so there's responsibility for their pleasures as well.
• The 3-word law reform results in change not just in some places, but in ALL locations. And provides benefits not just for some animals but for ALL animals.

Critiquing any speech, proposal or shift by reference to the duty of care is a pivotal consideration because it is the duty of care that identifies people's responsibilities, accountabilities, and potential liabilities.

Think about where animals intersect with people in daily life and you’ll see why updating the law is such an enormous potential gamechanger.

But it's only a "potential" gamechanger because the concept of 'sentience' and it's link with positive animal welfare law" is still widely misunderstood.

• That means there's a risk that the opportunities within animal law reforms will be delayed or even lost.
• Animals, people, and industry would consequently labour under well-intended but substandard law for decades to come.

"Positive animal welfare" law reform is NOT just a paper theory. It has already been implemented in Australia. The same authorities and rationales that advanced animal law in that jurisdiction are replicable in any other jurisdiction currently functioning on anticruelty law.

However, it's apparent that confusion remains. For example:

• The key question to elevating standards of animal welfare is NOT whether animals are sentient because wherever laws protect animals from "feeling or experiencing" pain or suffering there is an implicit recognition that animals are sentient - which is defined as the capability to feel or experience).
• Simply restating the implicit recognition by explicitly recognising animals as sentient changes nothing because it still just acknowledges that animals can "feel and experience" and continues a responsibility("duty of care") to protect animals from pain deemed unnecessary.

After recognising that anti-cruelty law implicitly recognises that animals feel and experience, the first critical question for meaningful change is to be clear about"what do animals feel or experience"? Common knowledge and the science of the Five Domains verifies that animals feel and experience both pain (negative states) and pleasure (positive states).

The second critical question is "what will society, via its law, apply a responsibility ("duty of care") for"?

• Specifically, will it continue to apply a legal responsibility for just one half of the animal's life experience (i.e. its pain)?
• Or will the duty of care be extended to be responsible for the animal's pleasure as well ("positive animal welfare law")?
• The inseparable nature of the human-animal relationship means that the answer to that question impacts the lives, quality of life, and future of people, not just animals.

How to create positive animal welfare law? That's comparatively simple. Law's power lies in creating responsibility by way of words and definitions. So, replicating what was done in Australia in 2019, define "sentience" as meaning that an animal experiences negative and positive states.

It's that straight forward.

But action is needed "now" because right now there are jurisdictions updating their animal law and either:

• failing to address the question of sentience at all, or
• with good intentions they are proposing to legislatively explicitly recognise animals as sentient BUT failing to include a definition of sentience. That means they're missing an essential step to delivering meaningful change.

Specifically, they're missing that "explicit" recognition of animal sentience without a legislative definition of sentience that changes the DUTY OF CARE has failed to deliver meaningful change in the past and so it will predictably fail to deliver meaningful change again.

• Because review of primary legislation traditionally occurs only once every 10-20 years, that confusion will delay potential benefits to people and animals for decades to come.
• That confusion also risks undermining, delaying or even derailing programs and initiatives seeking to resolve global problems that involve animals.

The alternative is the 3-word law reform (i.e. the 3 words are: "and positive states") that

• retains a duty of care to protect animals from cruelty
• and extends the anti-cruelty duty with positive animal welfare law.

• It's the same reform process that applied the science of the Five Freedoms to extend the duty of care beyond animal "protection" to animal "welfare".
• That same process is set to apply the updated science of the Five Domains to update the duty of care beyond cruelty by adding responsibilities for an animal's positive animal welfare.

One of the core concepts about positive animal welfare is the animal's ability to have access to conditions where it can make a 'choice' about what it enjoys. It's reassuring to recognise that many animal owners and people in charge of animals are already doing this. For example:

• Many farmers are already providing their animals with access to shade, opportunities to select preferred feeds, and even access to a brush down and back scratch on the way out of the milking shed. These are norms on many farms where farmers are already meeting and exceeding standards of 'best practice' having recognised that 'a happy animal is a productive animal'
• Similarly, many owners recognising that their horses are social animals, keep their horses in situations where they can mix, mingle, or separate themselves in desired, for other horses.
• Many dog owners take their dogs for walks, offer different diets, and provide items for play and interest.
• Reliable transporters commonly insist on animal containers that provide the animal with room to move, 'toilet and transport rests' and veterinary attendance.

The thing is, not ALL those in charge of animals provide those things.

But positive animal welfare law would extend legal responsibilities that apply to ALL people in charge of animals thereby resulting in today's standards of best practice becoming tomorrow's norm.

In the 1960's the science of the Five Freedoms resulted in animal law evolving to concepts of animal 'welfare' that retained previous obligations protecting animals from blatant acts of cruelty but added a responsibility to protect animals from 'likely' suffering as well by providing for their physical, health and behavioural needs. The objective was to prevent suffering rather than just act after the suffering had occurred.

• Science has progressed beyond the Five Freedoms to the Five Domains.
• The Five Domains validate what most people inherently know -  that animals experience not just pain but pleasure as well.
• Law reform to reflect contemporary scientific knowledge and society’s expectations of what constitutes ‘good practise’ is a well-established process so reforming the law again to reflect the science of the Five Domains is essentially responsible governance that engages standard legal methodology.

Law functions on words and their meaning so it's appropriate to have a clear understanding of what sentience means. Broadly it means the ability to ‘feel and experience’. There are several critical understandings that are the logical legal consequence of that widely agreed and fundamental definition:

1. The purpose of anti-cruelty law, identifiable by its duty of care, is to prevent an animal from ‘feeling or experiencing’ unnecessary pain.

• Consequently, anti-cruelty law implicitly recognises animals as sentient (i.e. having the ability to feel and experience).
• Mathematically this would be illustrated as ‘if A=B and B=C then A=C’ where A is the word sentience, B is ‘the ability to feel and experience’, and C is the law that protects animals from ‘feeling and experiencing’ unnecessary pain.

2. Understanding that anti-cruelty law already/implicitly recognises animals as sentient logically demonstrates why explicit legislative recognition of animal sentience substantively changes nothing in practice.

• Explicitly recognising animals as sentient is simply a restatement of what was has been implicitly established hundreds of years ago in jurisdictions with long-established anticruelty law.
• Put colloquially, irrespective of whether you state it quietly or aloud, both implicit and explicit recognition of animals as sentient primarily validates that animals are capable of feeling and experiencing (i.e. 'sentient').
• Acknowledging that animals 'do' feel and experience leads to the next logical question: ‘what do they feel’?

3. While most people inherently recognise that animals experience more than just pain, that common knowledge is now supported by the contemporary science of the Five Domains.

• The Five Domains has superseded the 1960s science of the Five Freedoms as the contemporary model of animal welfare.
• The Five Domains model provides updated scientific knowledge validating that animals feel and experience both negative states (i.e. pain, distress and suffering) and positive states of comfort, interest and pleasure.

4. Most people and organisations would agree that whether for moral or pragmatic purposes, it is desirable to see that animals have the ability to find shade in hot climates, are able to enjoy full physical movement, and have the opportunity to mingle with their social counterparts. Essentially, to see that animals have a good quality of life experience.

• It is obvious that while those opportunities are provided by some human caregivers, not all animals are fortunate to have human caregivers that provide the same quality of life experience.
• 'Lawfulness' referencing outdated science and superseded public notions of 'good practice' perpetuates practices that simply meet or exceed baseline minimum standards of anti-cruelty law.
• The correct questions are necessary to achieve meaningful change. So, the question is NOT ‘are animals’ sentient’ because that was implicitly decided in the affirmative by lawmakers literally hundreds of years ago.
• Instead, the question IS ‘will people, via their law, take responsibility for the animal's pain AND its pleasure'?
• Given the inseparable nature of the human-animal relationship, the answer to that question affects the life experience of people and not just animals.

5. Law hinges on the principle of responsibility. Specifically enforceable responsibility. In legal terms that enforceable responsibility is called the ‘duty of care’.

• Follow the evolution of animal law over the last 200 years and it’s quickly evident that the evolution of the duty of care is the pivotal factor that affects the lives of animals and people alike.
• The duty of care is at the centre of everything else about a piece of legislation. To illustrate that statement further, the offences, penalties and enforcement powers all revolve around the question ‘what are all citizens in this jurisdiction legally responsible, accountable and liable for in terms of the treatment of an animal’?
• In short, if there’s not a change in the duty of care then little to nothing changes in practice.
• So, a critical assessment of initiatives, speeches or legal reforms involving animals warrants putting focused attention on the duty of care.
  

6. Anti-cruelty law limits caregiver responsibility to baseline minimums by reference to just half of the animal's life experience (i.e. the animal's negative states).

• Anti-cruelty ‘welfare’ law is consistent with the 1960’s science of the Five Freedoms but not the contemporary science of the Five Domains.
• Anti-cruelty law applies a duty of care for just half of the animal's life experience (i.e. the animal’s negative states) so the question for those updating animal law is whether or not to evolve the duty of care to do more than simply protect animals from cruelty.
• Seminal leaders in science, industry, government and multiple public forums addressing the issue of animal welfare have identified that the animal's well-being involves more than simply avoiding pain.
• It's almost trite to state that less pain is not the same as more pleasure, however, the statement does help clarify the principle.
• The concept of providing animals with opportunities to experience positive states is known as ‘positive animal welfare’.

7. Turning positive animal welfare into law to ensure that all people and all people benefit doesn’t happen as a result of just explicitly restating the centuries-old implicit recognition. However, a legislative definition that evolves the duty of care does result in meaningful change in practice.

• ‘Positive animal welfare law’ retains and extends the anti-cruelty duty of care in a manner that is consistent with the existing legal paradigm and the well-established process of law reform.
• Furthermore, it provides a common ground of agreement between multiple stakeholders who, irrespective of different terminologies and worldviews, commonly envision all animals being able to enjoy their life rather than simply endure it.
• Positive animal welfare law is the turnkey to making that common vision a reality.

8. To progress beyond well-intended but ineffective explicit/restated-implicit legislative recognition of animals, clear and unequivocal responsibility for both parts of an animal's life experience requires an equally clear and unequivocal definition of sentience. The definition would be:

• consistent with the contemporary science of the Five Domains by clearly identifying and distinguishing negative and positive states,
• elevate standards of animal welfare in practice by making today's standards of best practise tomorrow's norm,
• drafted so as to provide ‘future proofed’ legislation to meet evolving science, facilitate economic growth and societal needs,
• promote evolved attitudes and behaviours addressing direct and tangental public issues involving animals, and
• demonstrate a pragmatically nationwide solution-based commitment to issues of today, 2050 and beyond.

The legislative definition that meets these criteria and moves the life experience of animals and people beyond cruelty with positive animal welfare law is ‘sentience means animals experience negative and positive states’.[1]

The evident misunderstanding/confusion about sentience, positive animal welfare law, the legal logic, and the long term impacts that affect animals and people and our shared planet for decades if not generations to come, underpin why there is a desperate need for legal responsibility to extend across both halves of the sentient animal’s life experience.