The science of animal sentience underpins the entire animal welfare movement. Demonstrating objectively what animals are capable of is key to achieving a positive change in attitudes and actions towards animals, and a real, sustainable difference for...
Concern for nature and for animal sentience are important public and political moral concerns. Using frameworks such as Harmony for Nature and One Health and the recent IPBES report on the Diverse Values of Nature, this paper considers how the two is...
Living systems are complex dynamic information processing energy consuming entities with properties of consciousness, intelligence, sapience, and sentience. Sapience and sentience are autonomous attributes of consciousness. While sapience has been we...
This paper aims to put in question the all-purposes function that sentience has come to play in animal ethics. In particular, I criticize the idea that sentience can provide a sound basis of equality, as has been recently proposed by Alasdair Cochran...
Knowledge of animal sentience is fundamental to many disciplines and imperative to the animal welfare movement. In this review, we examined what is being explored and discussed, regarding animal sentience, within the scientific literature. Rather tha...
The concept of sentience, how it is characterised and which non-human animals possess it have long been of contention in academic and intellectual debates. Many have argued that there is no way to empirically know that animals have conscious experien...
Fish are traded, caught, farmed, and killed in their trillions every year around the world, yet their welfare is often neglected and their sentience regularly disregarded. In this review, we have sought to (1) catalogue the extent to which fish senti...
Deciding which animals are sentient is an important precursor for decisions about the application of animal welfare legislation, and the wider assessment of the impacts of policies on animal suffering. We ascribe sentience in order to inform decision...
We searched a selection of the scientific literature to document evidence for, and explorations into reptile sentience. The intention of this review was to highlight; (1) to what extent reptile capability for emotions have been documented in the scie...
In this study, we examined how beliefs about farm animal sentience and their suffering vary across culture and demographic characteristics. A total of N = 5027) questionnaires were administered in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the USA. Brazilians...
Animal sentience is recognised either implicitly or explicitly in legislation in all Australian states and territories. In these jurisdictions, animal welfare legislation prohibits acts of cruelty towards animals because animals have the capacity to...
Taking a cue from J.W. Yates’ recent work on animal sentience published in this journal, which explores the field and categorizes it as a harmony with nature and a recognition of its values, inferring that the inclusion of animals in the sphere...
The aim of this study was to develop, implement, and evaluate a new auxiliary enterprise risk management framework and process to serve as an enabler to the global ISO 31000 risk framework and ISO 31010 processes. This framework has been designed par...
Attitudes to animals are linked to beliefs about their ability to experience pain and suffering, their cognition, and their sentience. Education and awareness-raising play a pivotal role in increasing society’s consideration of non-human animal...
The focus of this opinion is on the key features of sentience in animals which can experience different states of welfare, encapsulated by the new term ‘welfare-aligned sentience’. This term is intended to exclude potential forms of sentience that do...
The growing recognition of animal sentience has led to notable progress in European Union animal welfare legislation. However, a significant inconsistency remains: while mammals, birds, and cephalopods are legally protected as sentient beings, honeyb...
This essay addresses Cartesian duality and how its implicit dialectic might be repaired using physics and information theory. Our agenda is to describe a key distinction in the physical sciences that may provide a foundation for the distinction betwe...
The rapid growth of shrimp farming, particularly of Penaeus vannamei, accounts for about 80% of the global production of farmed shrimp and involves the cultivation of approximately 383 to 977 billion individuals annually, which highlights the urgent...
Early discussions about possible pain in crustaceans often comprised speculation and anecdotes. Experiments to investigate pain took guidance from these early debates, and from studies on other taxa. Many experiments provided data that are consistent...
This article explores the concept of ‘Tibetan Buddhist plant-hood’ within the doctrinal and ethnographic contexts of Tibetan Buddhism, proposing it as a framework to understand the karma-intricate relationships between plants, sentient be...
The paper discusses the connection between rhythm and meaning based on Augustine’s De musica. This central topic is illuminated by the analysis of other particular aesthetic concepts that one can find in Augustine (such as sentience and desire,...
The intricate relationships between humans and animals have long shaped philosophical, cultural and scientific inquiry. This narrative review examines evolving conceptions of animal consciousness, agency and sentience within broader historical, ethic...
Cells emerged at the very beginning of life on Earth and, in fact, are coterminous with life. They are enclosed within an excitable plasma membrane, which defines the outside and inside domains via their specific biophysical properties. Unicellular o...
Cloud computing makes the necessary resources available to the appropriate computation to improve scaling, resiliency, and the efficiency of computations. This makes cloud computing a new paradigm for computation by upgrading its artificial intellige...
The British people voted in a 2016 referendum to leave the European Union (EU). Brexit presents threats and opportunities to animal protection in the United Kingdom (UK), the EU, and internationally. This paper discusses opportunities for animal prot...
This essay aims to defend the need to help animals in any disaster situation, be it anthropogenic, natural, or hybrid. To this end, I will first establish a brief foundation of the antispeciesist principles that have been advocated by different theor...
Ethical behaviour tends to lead to the welfare consideration of animals, but much less so for invertebrates. Indigenous tradition often valued all animals as having an important role in life on the planet, a practical application of modern ecology. T...
The natural evolution of consciousness in different animal species mandates that conscious experiences are causally potent in order to confer any advantage in the struggle for survival. Any endeavor to construct a physical theory of consciousness bas...
Ethical principles governing the conduct of experiments with animals are reviewed, especially those relating to the choice of species. Legislation requires that the potential harm to animals arising from any procedure should be assessed in advance an...
The evolution of scientific knowledge regarding animal sentience, together with the growing concerns of consumers regarding current production models, has brought with it the responsibility of reviewing many practices carried out in industrial swine...
The welfare of invertebrates under human care is of growing concern, particularly with the increasing interest in insect farming as an environmentally sustainable means of producing food. Additionally, individual welfare monitoring systems can be tim...
Consumer demand for invertebrates is on the rise as their numbers in the wild dwindle. However, with the growing conservation efforts of modern zoos and aquariums, and evidence from over 300 studies showing that invertebrates are capable of sentience...
The commercial wildlife trade involves billions of animals each year, consumed for various purposes, including food, fashion, entertainment, traditional medicine, and pets. The experiences of the animals involved vary widely, with negative welfare st...
All living beings use autopoiesis and cognition to manage their “life” processes from birth through death. Autopoiesis enables them to use the specification in their genomes to instantiate themselves using matter and energy transformation...
There are, in the literature, distinct ways to approach animal welfare. The objective of this work was to study the value attributed to farm animals in the scientific papers published in animal welfare and animal production journals at three differen...
Conceptual frameworks for understanding animal welfare scientifically are widely influential. An early “biological functioning” framework still influences expert opinions prepared for Courts hearing animal cruelty cases, despite deficienc...
The ethical theories considered in this commentary include Anthropocentrism, Dominionism, Utilitarianism, Reverence for Life, Animal Rights, Biocentrism, Ecocentrism and Care Ethics. It is apparent that Utilitarianism provides a motivating rationale...
Excessive human population growth, uncontrolled use of natural resources, including deforestation, mining, wasteful systems, biodiversity reduction by agriculture, and damaging climate change affect the existence of all animals, including humans. Thi...
The use of Latin in identifying an organism’s genus and species is likely familiar to scientists and zoological professionals, but a traditional legal doctrine, known as habeas corpus (meaning “you have the body”) may not have obvio...
The Church–Turing thesis deals with computing functions that are described by a list of formal, mathematical rules or sequences of event-driven actions such as modeling, simulation, business workflows, etc. All algorithms that are Turing computable f...
This paper explores the ethical considerations surrounding research on echinoderms, a group of invertebrates that has recently garnered attention in the scientific community. The importance of responsible animal handling and the need for an ethical f...
Pain is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Since the beginnings of philosophical thought, the question of the nature and origin of pain has developed. However, it also raises the question of how an omnipotent and morally perfect God can allow so much pain and...
Welfare metrics have been established for octopuses in the laboratory, but not for octopuses living in the wild. Wild octopuses are constantly exposed to potentially harmful situations, and the ability to assess the welfare status of wild octopuses c...
An estimated 1.5–2.7 billion wild fish are caught by UK commercial sea fishing fleets annually. Most are subjected to severe stressors during capture; stunning is rare and gutting alive is common practice. Fish are recognised in UK law as senti...
A practical class using clicker training of chickens to apply knowledge of how animals learn and practice skills in animal training was added to an undergraduate course. Since attitudes to animals are related to their perceived intelligence, surveys...
Population growth and rising consumption of meat, dairy, eggs and fish are forcing the world to face the intersecting challenges of how to sustainably feed a population expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, while also controlling the impact of food p...
The field of consciousness displays a striking lack of consensus on many important issues, one of which is the possibility of consciousness in machines and software. However, consciousness in machines has dramatic ethical implications, regardless of...
As artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology becomes ever more pervasive in a wide range of human endeavor, from highly specialized technological and scientific applications to mass-market generative AI ‘consumed’ by the public, the qu...
The development of brain organoids from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) has expanded research into neurodevelopment, disease modeling, and drug testing. More recently, the concept of organoid intelligence (OI) has emerged, proposing that...
The concept of fish welfare is fairly recent and was overlooked for many years, based on a popular misconception that fish were “stupid” creatures devoid of any kind of sentience or mental capability [...]
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