Digital Commons Network^™

What Does The World Feel Like To Another Animal?, Andrew Rowan

WellBeing News

Animal sentience—the capacity to experience feelings such as pain, distress, comfort, and pleasure—is increasingly explored through scientific evidence. This article introduces the concept, considers how researchers investigate experiences animals cannot describe, and invites readers to look more closely at the many ways animals may experience the world.

Hope On Three Legs: Umka’S Journey From Ukraine To A New Beginning, Kathleen Rowan

WellBeing News

After years in a Ukrainian shelter, Umka faced a severe leg injury that ultimately required amputation. With compassionate care, rehabilitation, and cooperation among animal welfare organizations in Ukraine, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, Umka overcame his physical and emotional challenges and found a loving forever home.

Policy Brief Review: Wild Animal Welfare In Local Policies On Human-Wildlife Conflict, John Hadidian Phd

WellBeing News

A review of a 2026 policy brief examining how municipalities can incorporate wild animal welfare into policies addressing human-wildlife conflict. It highlights five key areas for action: waste management and food access, humane population management, conflict response and rehabilitation, the built environment and land use, and planning and governance.

Could 'Real Existing Ai' Be Sentient?, Tim Crane

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch is rightly sceptical about the idea that today’s AI machines (e.g. LLMs) are candidates for sentience. Nonetheless, he gives three reasons for taking the future possibility of AI sentience seriously. I dispute them all. Birch fails to distinguish the very idea of an artificial mind from computational AI (what I call ‘Real Existing AI’); he does not adequately distinguish a simulation from a replica or copy; and he fails to acknowledge that the appeal to computational functionalism in this context is straightforwardly question-begging.

Artificial Sentience: From Computational Functionalism To Behaviourism?, Wanja Wiese

Animal Sentience

I critically examine Jonathan Birch’s account of how brain emulations might create artificial sentience candidates, arguing that his account risks collapsing into a behaviourist account, unless the specific computational processes realised by such emulations are carefully considered. Drawing on examples from computational neuroscience, I show that similar behaviours can arise from vastly different computational processes, thereby undermining the suggestion to focus on behaviourial profiles to determine whether a brain emulation of a sentience candidate is itself a sentience candidate.

Birch On Fetal Sentience, Claudia Passos-Ferreira

Animal Sentience

Birch proposes that human fetuses be recognized as sentience candidates from 12 weeks, on the grounds that midbrain-centered theories fall within the zone of reasonable disagreement among theories of consciousness. I raise a methodological and a policy problem for his view. Methodologically, whether the midbrain-centered view belongs within the zone is disputed, so there is no consensus about the consensus.  Furthermore, the evidence Birch discusses for 12 weeks does not actually estimate the onset of sentience; the proposed threshold tracks anatomical rather than functional onset. On policy, the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling shows that fetal sentience is difficult to …

Navigating The Edge Of Sentience Without A Scientific Meta-Consensus, Daniel West

Animal Sentience

In The Edge of Sentience (2024, 2025), Birch develops a precautionary framework for crafting public policies about potentially sentient systems. Underlying this framework is a commitment to the democratic principle that the public should authorize all significant moral judgments that arise during the policymaking process. In this commentary, I suggest that Birch’s framework fails to live up to this commitment by requiring scientists without public accountability to make consequential moral judgments. I suggest a friendly amendment to Birch’s framework by replacing the idea of a scientific meta-consensus with the method of formal expert elicitation, a well-tested method of gathering expert …

From Insect Cognition To Sentience: Exploring The Edge, Catherine Macri, Martin Giurfa

Animal Sentience

What does The Edge of Sentience tell us about insect sentience and consciousness? In this commentary, we reflect on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience in animals. We discuss the methodological challenges of studying subjective experience in evolutionary distant species, and consider trace conditioning, affective states, and neural architectures as potential windows into consciousness in insects. We argue that uncertainty, whether concerning definitions or methodology, should not prevent experimental investigation; rather it should motivate new approaches and experimental designs for exploring the diversity of conscious experience.

The Varieties Of Precaution: Which Risks, Whose Attitudes?, Tomasz Żuradzki

Animal Sentience

The Edge of Sentience offers an ambitious and timely institutional framework for proportionate precaution under uncertainty about sentience. Its systematic treatment of empirical and theoretical uncertainty across diverse cases is a major contribution. Focusing on the problem of identifying and weighing different risks when designing proportionate precautions, this commentary suggests three areas in which Birch’s framework could be developed further: a more domain-sensitive justification of the priority given to avoiding under-attribution; a clearer distinction among competing forms of risk aversion and their divergent policy implications; and a fuller explanation of how the framework generates different recommendations across cases.

Beyond Better Conditions: Seaweed Farming And The Number Of Sentient Animals In Aquaculture, Shrilaxmi Patil, Matthew Unerman, Wasseem Emam

Animal Sentience

Oldfield & Bonano (2024) (O&B) document how far  fish welfare research lags behind welfare research in other animals. We share O&B’s feelings-based concept of welfare and agree that aquaculture seeded this field; but research volume has not scaled with animal numbers: Welfare attention per farmed fish or decapod remains negligible. Along the lines of preceding commentaries (Maia 2024, Mather 2024), we treat farmed aquatic animals as individuals rather than tonnage. We then raise a point so far absent from the commentary on O&B so far: reducing the number of sentient animals entering intensive systems. Coastal seaweed farming, which cultivates non-sentient …

Chemical Safety: From Toxic Ignorance To Intelligent Testing, Andrew Rowan Dphil

WellBeing News

Nearly three decades after concerns were raised about the lack of safety information for high-production-volume chemicals, significant progress has been made in both chemical data collection and testing technologies. This article explores the scale of the chemical safety challenge, the limitations of traditional animal testing, and the growing role of artificial intelligence and New Approach Methods (NAMs) in delivering faster, more human-relevant, and more efficient chemical risk assessments.

Economic Growth, Animal Welfare And The Future Of Farming, Andrew Rowan Dphil

WellBeing News

As countries become wealthier, rising incomes drive greater consumption of meat and other animal products while encouraging a transition from extensive livestock production to intensive farming systems. Although agricultural innovation has improved land-use efficiency and reduced pressure on forests in many regions, concerns persist about animal welfare, aquaculture and the environmental impact of pet food production. Consumer demand, corporate commitments and technological advances—including cage-free housing, in ovo sexing and alternative proteins—are gradually reducing some forms of animal suffering and may ultimately reshape the future of animal agriculture.

The Slow Transformation Of Biomedical Research, Andrew Rowan Dphil

WellBeing News

Animal-based neuroscience is entering a period of structural transition rather than abrupt decline. Drawing on a recent analysis by two Mexican neuroscientists, this article explores changing attitudes toward laboratory animal use, recent developments at U.S. primate research centers, long-term declines in public support for animal experimentation, and the increasing interest in human-based, in vitro, computational, and other non-animal methods that are reshaping the future of neuroscience research.

Why Do We Need To Prove That Pigs Feel?, Aranza Vera-Espinoza, Nancy Harlet Esquivel-Marín

Animal Sentience

Birch's framework manages uncertainty but overlooks the likelihood that citizen panels have speciesist biases that reduce precaution to mere harm-management even in species that undoubtedly feel.

Self-Maintenance And The Evidence For Artificial Sentience, Mads J. Hansen, Christoffer Lundbak Olesen

Animal Sentience

Birch aims to remain neutral about whether life is necessary for sentience. We argue that life can be given a role while maintaining neutrality. Markers of sentience have been identified in living systems, where some contribute to the system's self-maintenance. When such a marker is reproduced in an artificial system that is not self-maintaining it is not clear that it is as reliable as in living systems.

What Does Sentience Mean At The Neural Level?, Björn Brembs

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch's (2025) LSE criteria for sentience include motivational trade-offs, exemplified by C. elegansweighing hunger against desiccation risk. Yet once the neural circuit is known, this "trade-off" reduces to a single inhibitory synapse—an ‘elemental’ account discrediting the ‘molar’ one. My commentary illustrates the same discrepancy in Drosophila: dopaminergic ramping during courtship as it progressively suppresses threat-detecting neurons; so persistence past danger reflects recalibrated valuation rather than a weighed decision. As neurobiology increasingly discovers such discrepancies, all criteria resting on behavioral classifications risk being defined away without altering the behavior's validity.

Ai Is Not The Kind Of Thing That Can Ever Be Sentient, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

Sentience evolved to allow organisms to move through their environment avoiding harms and achieving benefits. Sentience did not evolve from computation. It evolved from valenced feelings. AI (even robots) are not embodied and are not the kind of thing that needs to be sentient. There is no way to get from computations to feelings. They are qualitatively different things. We should avoid being lulled into thinking that an inanimate object designed to engage our propensity for anthropomorphism, like AI, is actually a mind.

Look Out For Our Kind, Christof Koch

Animal Sentience

Strongly supportive overall of Birch’s broad tent Sentience Project, I offer an alternative dyadic, single-class, two-stage process based on estimating the probability for sentience, and the associated confidence, for any individual or taxonomic group. I criticize Birch’s narrow computational framework when addressing the question of algorithmic sentience; there are alternative approaches.

More Than Companionship: How Dogs May Improve Human Well-Being, Andrew Rowan

WellBeing News

Dogs enrich our lives in countless ways, but studies indicate that dog ownership is associated with improved cardiovascular outcomes and longer survival after major heart events. Explore what the science says in this article.

Walking The Tightrope: The Precautionary Dilemma Of Neutrality And Guidance, Farhan Lakhany

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch’s The Edge of Sentience promises a precautionary framework that guides ethical action without taking sides in the disputed metaphysics of consciousness. I argue that it cannot do both. Birch admits “biopsychism” (that all living organisms are conscious) into his "zone of reasonable disagreement," yet his operational criteria exclude plants and unicellular organisms by requiring evidence that biopsychism holds to be irrelevant. This leaves a dilemma. Keeping the “broad” standard preserves neutrality but extends candidacy to all life, guiding nothing; restricting to scientific evidence guides action but is itself the theoretical commitment the framework was meant to avoid.

Dimensional Welfare Beyond Pain: Extending The Precautionary Principle In Birch’S “The Edge Of Sentience”, Willa M. Lane, Nicola S. Clayton

Animal Sentience

Birch's (2024) The Edge of Sentience identifies sentience candidates primarily through the pain-focused LSE Criteria. Yet, as Birch himself notes in Proposal 17, sentience is not pain. We argue that statutory welfare protections must therefore reach beyond pain, and that the right tool for doing so is Birch et al.’s (2020) dimensionality framework, which characterises conscious experience across five domains. Used together, the LSE Criteria establish that welfare is at stake, while the dimensionality framework maps what is at stake beyond pain to provide a taxon-specific profile of where captivity impoverishes experience. We apply this approach to invertebrate welfare and …

Animal Ethics And The Lowest Common Denominator, John O. Adenitire

Animal Sentience

This commentary assesses the pragmatic framework proposed in Jonathan Birch’s The Edge of Sentience (2024). Celebrating the book's exceptional clarity, scientific rigor, and profound real-world impact on UK legislation, I nevertheless have some questions about the method by which Birch arrives at his policy recommendations for animal protection. In seeking an overlapping consensus between deeply divergent ethical and credal viewpoints, the framework risks defaulting to a minimalist, lowest-common-denominator standard of protection for animals. Birch also risks drawing the standard even lower by including serious academic positions in animal ethics that deny moral status for animals altogether. A rights-based approach offers …

On The Edge Of Science?, Mark Briffa, Lynne U. Sneddon

Animal Sentience

In The Edge of Sentience, Jonathan Birch (2024) provides a thought-provoking synthesis of current perspectives on animal (and artificial) sentience. He addresses the question from conceptual, ethical, regulatory and empirical viewpoints. Here we focus on some of the scientific issues raised, including defining and operationalising the concept of sentience and the implications for policy and regulation. Despite unresolved conceptual challenges, the book makes a compelling case for the continued scientific investigation of animal sentience.

From The Edge To The Grounds Of “Sentientism”, David Degrazia

Animal Sentience

Birch’s book is a remarkable exploration of the nature of sentience, its moral salience, evidence for its presence, and how to arrive at humane policies regarding our treatment of human beings, animals, brain organoids, and AI systems of uncertain sentience. Although Birch endorses the view that sentience is of fundamental moral importance, he endeavors to remain neutral among reasonable moral views and work out how to navigate through uncertainty—both ethical and epistemological—to arrive at defensible policies. While making common cause with Birch’s project, my own recent book advances a developed case in favor of the “sentientism” Birch endorses.

Natural Behavior Vs. Subjective Experience In Fish Welfare Assessments, Ronald G. Oldfield

Animal Sentience

Several commentaries on the Oldfield & Bonano (2024) target article proposed that natural behavior should play a larger role in assessing the welfare of fishes in zoos and aquariums. However, the natural-behavior concept of animal welfare has been widely criticized because natural behaviors do not necessarily improve welfare, and unnatural behaviors do not necessarily reduce it. I review the three major concepts of animal welfare — physical health, natural behavior, and affect/feelings — and argue that behavior patterns, whether natural or otherwise, should be evaluated according to their effects on health and subjective experience. Using the affect/feelings concept and the …

What We Don't See On Our Plates: The Hidden Costs Of Modern Farming, Andrew Rowan Dphil

WellBeing News

Discover what's missing from the true price of the food on our plates. This article highlights the environmental, health, and animal welfare challenges linked to today's intensive farming practices.

When Animals In Crisis Unite The World: Lessons Across Time, Kathleen Rowan Ceo, Andrew Rowan Dphil

WellBeing News

Explore how high-profile animal rescue efforts have united people across political, geographic, and cultural boundaries in response to animals in crisis. This article examines what landmark cases involving whales and orcas can teach us to improve rescue outcomes.

Living On The Edge: Human–Baboon Conflict In Cape Town, Andrew Rowan Dphil

WellBeing News

This article highlights the challenges of balancing wildlife conservation with human communities on South Africa's Cape Peninsula. Learn more about the policies, stakeholder viewpoints, and management approaches shaping efforts to reduce human–baboon conflict.

Cat Management In Australia: Emerging Policies And Competing Perspectives, Andrew Rowan Dphil

WellBeing News

This article explores Australia’s evolving cat management policies and the growing debate surrounding feral, stray, and companion cats. It highlights initiatives such as containment regulations, eradication campaigns, and trap-neuter-vaccinate-return programs while examining the tensions between biodiversity protection, animal welfare, and public attitudes toward cats.

Aggression And Fish Welfare: Challenges And Opportunities, Christine M. Soper, Peter D. Dijkstra

Animal Sentience

Oldfield & Bonano’s (2024) [O&B] target article discusses the wellbeing and sociality of bony fishes. Many fish species, such as cichlids, are not only social but territorial. Aggression is normal, but territorial aggression in a captive environment can have a negative impact on welfare. Aggression-related injuries and deaths are prevalent in pet stores as well as research settings. We discuss the need to develop effective methods to minimize the negative consequences of aggression.