Animal Sentience
Animal sentience means that animals are sentient beings with thoughts, feelings, and individual personalities. Our scientific research and evidence irrefutably prove this.
Animals have their own preferences, desires, and needs; we humans may not always know what they are. But if we can use our knowledge of animal sentience to monitor and measure their emotional states, then we can seek to ensure that we avoid causing them pain and distress.
“The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?”
Do they suffer?
Our work to make animals’ perspectives understood
We know that every animal counts. We view the world through their perspectives, and we give them a voice. Sentience is at the heart of everything we do.
Our work elevates animal welfare to a priority issue of global importance. Though to truly understand animals' perspectives and ensure people hear their voices, raising the public’s understanding of animal sentience is crucial to success.
By joining our community you can help to improve animals' welfare and the legislation and practices affecting them.
Animals have needs and emotions surrounding comfort, companionship, and freedom; they can experience both physical and psychological pain. Whether we are working to end factory farming, or to stop the cruel wildlife trade and entertainment industries, measuring and understanding sentience is vital in compelling people to change their behaviour.
What is sentience?
Sentience is the ability to feel a range of emotions and feelings, such as pleasure, pain, joy, and fear. Some animals even experience complex emotions, such as grief and empathy. Animals are sentient beings, and this means that their feelings matter.
The more we learn about the minds of animals, the harder it is to justify the practices we use that cause them to suffer. It is also harder to neglect that animals can and want to feel positive emotions and states too. They, like us, want to feel good.
They want to do things they enjoy; they want to exert control over their own lives, have choices, play, feel satiated and comfortable, solve problems, get excited, and seek the comfort of companions.
These things matter to animals, and they matter to us.
Our understanding of animal sentience still varies depending on the species, as some groups of animals, such as mammals, have received far more attention than others.
Vertebrate species
We know that all vertebrate species are sentient and that although some groups, such as birds, have evolved different brain structures to ours, they still have what they need to process experiences and feel emotions. In fact, chickens demonstrate empathy, and magpies appear to feel grief.
Reptiles and amphibians
Other groups of animals, such as reptiles, amphibians, and fish, are often dismissed as cold-blooded and incapable of feeling. This is simply not true. As vertebrates, they possess the physiological and neurological requirements for conscious experiences, and their behaviour indicates that not only can they feel, but that their feelings matter.
Invertebrates
Beyond vertebrates, scientists are also uncovering more about the subjective lives of invertebrates too.
Research shows considerable evidence for a wide range of cognitive abilities in insects, as well as evidence for important sentience traits, including stress, pessimism and emotion.
Numerous studies have explored whether cephalopods, like octopuses and squids, and decapod crustaceans, like crabs and lobsters, can feel important states like pain and fear. The evidence is clear, these invertebrates may not have the same anatomy and brain structures as we mammals do, but they are sentient, and they can feel a range of emotions and experiences.
The future for sentience science and animal welfare
The future of animal sentience science is exciting and brilliant. Never has there been such enthusiasm and drive to learn about what animals think and feel. World Animal Protection will continue to promote this area of science and showcase the growing body of research that demonstrates the diverse nature of the emotional lives of animals.
In our work to end factory farming, we will keep using the growing body of research on animal sentience to show the world that intensive systems cannot meet the needs of these complex, sentient beings who we farm in their trillions.
As we continue to campaign and work for wild animals, stakeholders will recognise the importance of protecting sentient beings from the inhumane practices commonly seen in the wildlife trade and entertainment industries.