Sentience, in a broad sense, is the capacity to feel. In a narrower sense, it refers to the capacity to have feelings with a positive or negative quality, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, boredom, excitement, frustration, anxiety and joy. These feelings have the elusive property that philosophers like to call “phenomenal consciousness”. It feels like something to have them.
In recent years, an interdisciplinary community of animal sentience researchers, drawn from neuroscience, comparative psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare science and philosophy, has begun to emerge. However, the field is characterized by foundational controversy over the nature of sentience and the criteria for its attribution, leading to heated debate over the presence or absence of sentience in fish and in invertebrates such as cephalopods (e.g. octopods, squid) and arthropods (e.g. bees, crabs).
The Foundations of Animal Sentience project (ASENT), led by Dr Jonathan Birch, aimed to find ways to resolve these debates. What was needed was a conceptual framework for thinking about sentience as an evolved phenomenon that varies along several dimensions, a deeper understanding of how these dimensions of sentience relate to measurable aspects of animal behaviour and the nervous system, and a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of animals.
ASENT achieved these objectives by constructing a five-dimension framework for thinking about variation in conscious states that has already proven influential in the field. It also provided a methodological strategy for making progress on contested cases (the "theory-light" strategy) that has been widely adopted. It generated groundbreaking results concerning the possibility of sentience in bees, through collaborations with Professor Lars Chittka's lab at Queen Mary, University of London. And it provided precautionary framework for designing policy consistently in the face of risks to the welfare of sentient beings.
