Animal Sentience: Where Are We and Where Are We Heading?
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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 animal welfare. This paper briefly summarises understanding and acceptance of animal sentience through the ages. Although not an exhaustive history, it highlights some of the leading figures whose opinions and work have most affected perspectives of animal sentience. There follows a review of the current state of animal sentience, what is known, and what the main limitations have been for the development of the study of sentience. The paper concludes with some thoughts for the future of the science, and where it should be going in order to most benefit animal welfare.
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These dog attributes are indicators of sentience.
“These attributes are also indicators of sentience, which is only now being empirically proven in animals.”
From The Dog-Eared Dictionary: Human-Animal Alliance in Chinese Civilization (2015) · cites this paper as Proctor 2012
Section 5.1 (page unavailable) reports research showing optimism and pessimism in dogs, supporting the use of those emotional attributes as evidence of sentience. The citing sentence does not specify which dog attributes it means, and Section 2 cautions that animal sentience is difficult to prove conclusively; the claim that it is being empirically proven overstates that qualification. (LLM, conf=0.80)
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POSITIVE WELFARE INDICATORS IN DAIRY ANIMALS
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- Authors
- Proctor, H.
- Affiliations
- World Animal Protection (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Proctor, Helen
- ORCID
- Proctor, Helen
- Venue
- Animals
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2012-11-14
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 628-639
- ISSN
- 2076-2615 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4494284
- OpenAlex
- W2064865761
- Cited by
- 143
- References
- 54
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 14 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 0.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Animals (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Veterinary › Small Animals › Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies
- Social Sciences › Law › Animal Law and Welfare
- Health Sciences › Veterinary › Small Animals › Animal testing and alternatives
- Keywords
- animal sentience, animal welfare, animal cognition, attitudes toward animals
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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