Teaching & Learning Guide for: Animal Sentience

Animal sentience, in a broad sense, refers to the capacity of an animal to have feelings with a subjective character. If an animal is sentient, there is something that it is like to be that animal. These feelings can include pleasure and pain, but also others such as hunger, curiosity, loneliness, and fear. Animal sentience plays an important role in ethical deliberations, as sentient animals are capable of suffering, a capacity frequently taken to ground moral status. It is also increasingly relevant for policy looking to protect the welfare of animals. Precautionary reasoning can be used to award protection to taxa for which there is some reasonable evidence of sentience, even if this evidence is not definitive. The subjective nature of sentience makes it a difficult scientific target. However, there are an increasing range of indirect indicators that can be used together to infer sentience, including those based on the differences in conscious vs unconscious performance by humans on perceptual and learning tasks, and those based on proposed evolutionary functions of sentience. These indicators can then be used to guide inferences about the distribution of sentience throughout the animal kingdom. There is now wide agreement that there is sufficient evidence to warrant the attribution of sentience to most vertebrates, though some sceptics still question the case for fish. Current work on is also suggestive of sentience in some invertebrates, including cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans.