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Can Unconscious Brain Processes Indicate Sentience?, Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, Piercesare Grimaldi, Hakwan Lau Jan 2017

Can Unconscious Brain Processes Indicate Sentience?, Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, Piercesare Grimaldi, Hakwan Lau

Animal Sentience

We disagree with Woodruff that we have good neurobiological reasons to think fishes are sentient, because mechanisms for consciousness are controversial even in humans. To the extent that there are consensuses in that literature, they do not support Woodruff's claims.

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Fish Are Flexible Learners Who Can Discriminate Human Faces, Ulrike E. Siebeck Jan 2017

Fish Are Flexible Learners Who Can Discriminate Human Faces, Ulrike E. Siebeck

Animal Sentience

In his book “What a fish knows” Jonathan Balcombe (2016a, b) has created a comprehensive profile of a group of animals still often thought to have a 3-second memory, no ability to feel pain, and a generally limited ability to learn. Chapter by chapter, Balcombe dismantles these and other such assumptions and makes a convincing case that fish have many abilities that are not that different from our own. Here, I focus on one example which supports the notion that fish are flexible learners and able to perform tasks which are generally thought to require the advanced processing power of …

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Sensitizing Humans To Fish Sentience, Kelly Levenda Jan 2017

Sensitizing Humans To Fish Sentience, Kelly Levenda

Animal Sentience

Although fish can feel pain and suffer, they are not often protected legally. Jonathan Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows provides a timely and important contribution to the literature on animal cognition and sentience. By explaining their personalities and capabilities, Balcombe brings much needed public attention to fish and advances the principle that they need and deserve protection.

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Canine Emotions As Seen Through Human Social Cognition, Miiamaaria V. Kujala Jan 2017

Canine Emotions As Seen Through Human Social Cognition, Miiamaaria V. Kujala

Animal Sentience

It is not possible to demonstrate that dogs (Canis familiaris) feel emotions, but the same is true for all other species, including our own. The issue must therefore be approached indirectly, using premises similar to those used with humans. Recent methodological advances in canine research reveal what dogs experience and what they derive from the emotions perceptible in others. Dogs attend to social cues, they respond appropriately to the valence of human and dog facial expressions and vocalizations of emotion, and their limbic reward regions respond to the odor of their caretakers. They behave differently according to the …

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The Study Of Emotion In Animals, Thomas R. Zentall Jan 2017

The Study Of Emotion In Animals, Thomas R. Zentall

Animal Sentience

The responsiveness of dogs to humans encourages us to attribute human-like emotions to them. Indirect evidence for emotions in other animals can be obtained but one must be careful to find means of distinguishing what we believe to be evidence for such emotions from simpler mechanisms. For example, is a dog’s growl an indication of anger, fear, or possibly an unemotional defense of territory? By carefully designing experiments, we may be able to rule out alternative accounts and show better evidence for underlying emotions.

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Emotion In Dogs: Translational And Transformative Aspects, Silvan R. Urfer Jan 2017

Emotion In Dogs: Translational And Transformative Aspects, Silvan R. Urfer

Animal Sentience

Kujala (2017) provides an excellent overview of most aspects of emotion in dogs; however, she does not cover a few fields of research that I think are also relevant to the topic. In this commentary, I discuss the current state of our knowledge regarding cognitive decline and behavioral disorders in dogs as potential models for human neurodegenerative disease and mental illness; how emotion and cognition in dogs interact with sex, gonadectomy, and sexual behavior; as well as the transformative potential of functional MRI imaging of the conscious dog brain in the study of comparative neurophysiology.

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Direct Perception Of Animal Mind, Paul Morris Jan 2017

Direct Perception Of Animal Mind, Paul Morris

Animal Sentience

Kujala’s (2017) target article is ostensibly focused on how everyday folk (fail to) make sense of canine emotions. However, the theories outlined in the article apply to making sense of all aspects of the mentality of both human and non-human animals. The target article neglects the fundamental arguments surrounding the problem of other minds. I explore the relevant arguments and briefly review approaches suggesting that our everyday-life sense that both human and non-human animals are thinking, feeling, emotional beings has a secure epistemological basis.

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Communicating Canine And Human Emotions, Juliane Bräuer, Karine Silva, Stefan R. Schweinberger Jan 2017

Communicating Canine And Human Emotions, Juliane Bräuer, Karine Silva, Stefan R. Schweinberger

Animal Sentience

Kujala (2017) reviews a topic of major relevance for the understanding of the special dog-human relationship: canine emotions (as seen through human social cognition). This commentary draws attention to the communication of emotions within such a particular social context. It highlights challenges that need to be tackled to further advance research on emotional communication, and it calls for new avenues of research. Efforts to disentangle emotional processes from cognitive functioning might be necessary to better comprehend how they contribute, alone and/or in combination, to the communication of emotions. Also, new research methods need to be developed to account for the …

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Do We Understand What It Means For Dogs To Experience Emotion?, Lasana T. Harris Jan 2017

Do We Understand What It Means For Dogs To Experience Emotion?, Lasana T. Harris

Animal Sentience

Psychologists who study humans struggle to agree on a definition of emotion, falling primarily into two camps. Though recent neuroscience advances are beginning to settle this ancient debate, it cannot solve the private-language problem at the heart of inferences about social cognition. This suggests that when we consider the emotional experiences of other species like canines, biological and physiological homologs do not provide enough evidence of emotional experiences similar to those of humans. Secondary complex emotional experiences are even more difficult to attribute to non-humans since such experiences rely, by definition, on social cognition. Given the contextual differences between human-human …

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The Development And Expression Of Canine Emotion, Allison L. Martin Jan 2017

The Development And Expression Of Canine Emotion, Allison L. Martin

Animal Sentience

In her review of canine emotions, Kujala (2017) discusses how humans often attribute emotions such as fear, love, and jealousy to their canine companions. This attribution is often dismissed as anthropomorphism, suggesting that only humans can possess these emotions. I argue that emotions are not something we possess but features of certain behavioral patterns. Both human and canine emotions arise through evolution and conditioning; examining their development and expression may lead to new insights about both canine and human behavior.

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Beyond The Provable?, Márta Gácsi Jan 2017

Beyond The Provable?, Márta Gácsi

Animal Sentience

Reading Kujala’s (2017) target article, I wondered whether we really need to approach the issue of animals’ emotions the traditional way, asking whether animals have emotions that are identical, similar or precursors to those of humans. As an ethologist, I prefer to examine psychological phenomena from an evolutionary perspective, focusing on Tinbergen’s (1963) four questions (Bateson & Laland 2013).

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Empathy In Dogs: With A Little Help From A Friend – A Mixed Blessing, Sabrina Karl, Ludwig Huber Jan 2017

Empathy In Dogs: With A Little Help From A Friend – A Mixed Blessing, Sabrina Karl, Ludwig Huber

Animal Sentience

Kujala (2017) presents an extensive overview of existing research on canine emotions in comparison to those of other non-human animals and humans. This commentary provides some additional research results on the intensively debated field of empathy in dogs. We focus on recent advances in the understanding of a fundamental building block of empathy — emotional contagion — and on dogs’ remarkable sensitivity for human emotions, including the skills of assistance dogs.


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Studying Dog Emotion Beyond Expression And Without Concern For Feeling, Peter F. Cook Jan 2017

Studying Dog Emotion Beyond Expression And Without Concern For Feeling, Peter F. Cook

Animal Sentience

Studies of dog emotion have focused on the expression of social emotion, either because this is taken to suggest human-like feeling states in dogs or because it has been the most accessible signal of dog emotional processing. I argue for an approach grounded in affective neuroscience, relying on direct measures of physiology across different contexts. This work may be particularly fertile in exploring social emotion in the dog, not because dogs necessarily share human emotional states, but because they are unique in having likely evolved to fit a human social niche.

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Inferring Emotion Without Language: Comparing Canines And Prelinguistic Infants, Stefanie Hoehl Jan 2017

Inferring Emotion Without Language: Comparing Canines And Prelinguistic Infants, Stefanie Hoehl

Animal Sentience

Research on canine emotions has to deal with challenges quite similar to psychological research on social and emotional development in human infants. In both cases, verbal reports are unattainable, and behavioral and physiological methods have to be adjusted to the specific population. I will argue that both regarding empirical approaches and conceptual work, advances in research on social-cognitive development in human infants can inform the study of canine emotions.

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Positive Emotions And Quality Of Life In Dogs, Patrizia Piotti Jan 2017

Positive Emotions And Quality Of Life In Dogs, Patrizia Piotti

Animal Sentience

Positive affect is fundamental to ensuring good animal welfare. Discrete and dimensional theories of emotion have recently been used to explore the relation between cognition and affect and to develop cognitive measures of positive affect. Human quality-of-life assessment focuses on positive affect, which is difficult to measure objectively in dogs. Expanding on Kujala’s (2017) discussion of positive emotions and cognitive measures of affect, I suggest how these are relevant to assessing canine quality of life.

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What Can Vigilance Tell Us About Fear?, Guy Beauchamp Jan 2017

What Can Vigilance Tell Us About Fear?, Guy Beauchamp

Animal Sentience

Animal vigilance is concerned with the monitoring of potential threats caused by predators and conspecifics. Researchers have argued that threats are part of a landscape of fear tracking the level of risk posed by predators and conspecifics. Vigilance, which is expected to vary with the level of risk, could thus be used as a measure of fear. Here, I explore the relationship between vigilance and fear caused by predators and conspecifics. The joint occurrence of vigilance and other physiological responses to fear, such as increased heart rate and stress hormone release, would bolster the idea that vigilance can be a …

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Operationalizing Fear Through Understanding Vigilance, Ralph Adolphs Jan 2017

Operationalizing Fear Through Understanding Vigilance, Ralph Adolphs

Animal Sentience

Beauchamp’s target article raises important questions about the features that often accompany fear. How reliable an indicator of fear is vigilance? Is it constitutive, cause, or consequence of fear? These questions force us towards a clearer definition of “fear.”

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Considering Side Biases In Vigilance And Fear, Lesley J. Rogers Jan 2017

Considering Side Biases In Vigilance And Fear, Lesley J. Rogers

Animal Sentience

Measures of vigilance and fear might be more consistently associated if side biases are taken into account, because the right side of the brain is specialised to detect predators and to express fear responses. In species with eyes positioned laterally and with relatively small binocular fields, this brain asymmetry is manifested as eye preferences because each eye sends most of its input to be processed in the opposite side of the brain. Hence, responses elicited by stimuli on the animal’s left side are more likely be associated with fear than are responses to the same stimuli on the animal’s right …

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Methodological Suggestions For Inferring Fear From Vigilance, Julie A. Teichroeb Jan 2017

Methodological Suggestions For Inferring Fear From Vigilance, Julie A. Teichroeb

Animal Sentience

I suggest some methods for data-collection and analysis that may help researchers infer fear from vigilance.

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Changing The Subject, Joel Marks Jan 2017

Changing The Subject, Joel Marks

Animal Sentience

I detect at least two unspoken assumptions in Birch’s project, and I question, indeed, reject both of them. One is that welfare is the primary concern of animal ethics. I think liberation is. Birch’s other assumption is that the scientific investigation of animal sentience is key to promoting animal ethics. I think science is largely irrelevant to progress on this front and can even be counterproductive.

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What If All Animals Are Sentient?, Arthur S. Reber Jan 2017

What If All Animals Are Sentient?, Arthur S. Reber

Animal Sentience

Birch develops a useful framework for determining when the Animal Sentience Precautionary Principle (ASPP) should be invoked. He rightly notes that there is a lack of agreement among social scientists, ethicists, and legislators even about whether the precautionary principle is useful, let alone when and how it should be implemented. His proposal is to establish a kind of cognitive threshold, and only when an animal shows a sufficient level of sentience would the ASPP be appropriate. From the point of view of the Cellular Basis of Consciousness model (Reber, 2016), all animals are sentient. If correct, the problems Birch identifies …

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Raising The Moral Consciousness Of Science, Bernard Rollin Jan 2017

Raising The Moral Consciousness Of Science, Bernard Rollin

Animal Sentience

Precaution on behalf of sentient animals should not be tempered by the questionable principle of the amorality of science.

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Justifying The Precautionary Principle With Expected Net-Welfare Maximization, Yew-Kwang Ng Jan 2017

Justifying The Precautionary Principle With Expected Net-Welfare Maximization, Yew-Kwang Ng

Animal Sentience

The precautionary principle may be best justified on the principle of expected net-welfare/benefit maximization; there is no conflict between the two principles. We should want to be more cautious for cases with high benefit-to-cost ratios; there should thus be different degrees of precaution. For measures to reduce extinction-threatening environmental disruption or to reduce animal suffering that cost us little or nothing, we should adopt them even for species having only a small likelihood of being sentient, i.e., we should be more cautious. This argument is based on welfarism, which I strongly defend elsewhere (Ng 1990 & forthcoming).

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Will The Precautionary Principle Broaden Acceptance Of Animal Sentience?, Simon Leadbeater Jan 2017

Will The Precautionary Principle Broaden Acceptance Of Animal Sentience?, Simon Leadbeater

Animal Sentience

Birch uses existing practice to develop a formal Animal Sentience Precautionary Principle (ASPP), which he hopes will become more widely adopted and improve animal welfare outcomes. Birch considers the assumption that all animals are sentient to be extreme. Despite its merits, Birch’s ASPP remains human-centred.

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What Harmful Practices? The Material Scope Of Animal Protection Legislation, Eze Paez Jan 2017

What Harmful Practices? The Material Scope Of Animal Protection Legislation, Eze Paez

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch proposes a criterion for the subjective scope of animal protection legislation. He says nothing about its material scope: which harmful practices it should regulate. I argue, first, that most moral views would agree that the worst forms of animal exploitation should be legally forbidden, even if there will inevitably be disagreement about some cases of animal experimentation. I also argue that, when feasible, there should be legal provisions to help wild animals.

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Animal Pain And The Social Role Of Science, Leslie Irvine Jan 2017

Animal Pain And The Social Role Of Science, Leslie Irvine

Animal Sentience

Assuming that all animals are sentient would mean ending their use in most scientific research. This does not necessarily imply an unscientific or anti-scientific stance. Examining the social role of science reveals its considerable investment in preserving the status quo, including the continued use of animal subjects. From this perspective, the use of animal subjects is a custom that science could move beyond, rather than a methodological requirement that it must defend.

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A Preliminary Investigation Into The Welfare Of Lobsters In The Uk, Gemma Carder Jan 2017

A Preliminary Investigation Into The Welfare Of Lobsters In The Uk, Gemma Carder

Animal Sentience

The welfare of invertebrates is overlooked and their needs are not understood. It is assumed that they do not experience pain and suffering. Studies on decapod crustaceans challenge this assumption. Research has focused on distinguishing between nociception (the ability to detect a harmful stimulus and to react to it reflexively) and pain (an aversive feeling or emotional experience). Findings indicate that decapod crustaceans can experience pain, which supports a case for protecting their welfare. I have investigated the current husbandry conditions of a globally consumed decapod crustacean, the lobster, as housed in tanks inside food outlets in the UK. Housing …

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Refining The Precautionary Framework, Jonathan Birch Jan 2017

Refining The Precautionary Framework, Jonathan Birch

Animal Sentience

Most of the commentators so far agree that the precautionary principle can be usefully applied to the question of animal sentience. I consider various ways of refining my proposals in light of the suggestions. I amend BAR to implement C. Brown’s suggestion that the scope of animal welfare law should be extensible by phylogenetic inference from orders in which credible indicators of sentience are found. In response to C. Brown, Mallatt, and Woodruff, I amend ACT to allow that a single credible indicator may sometimes call for urgent further investigation rather than immediate protection. In response …

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Assessing Negative And Positive Evidence For Animal Pain, Robert W. Elwood Jan 2017

Assessing Negative And Positive Evidence For Animal Pain, Robert W. Elwood

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch suggests that we should take one well-conducted study that produces results consistent with the idea of pain as being sufficient to invoke the animal sentience precautionary principle. Here, I consider how to balance negative and positive results from such studies using examples from my own work. I also consider which criteria of pain might provide strong inference about pain and which may prove to be weaker.

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Dissonance Reduction In Nonhuman Animals: Implications For Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Cindy Harmon-Jones, Nick Haslam, Brock Bastian Jan 2017

Dissonance Reduction In Nonhuman Animals: Implications For Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Cindy Harmon-Jones, Nick Haslam, Brock Bastian

Animal Sentience

We review the evidence for dissonance reduction in nonhuman animals and examine the alternative explanations for these effects. If nonhuman animals engage in dissonance reduction, this supports the original theory as proposed by Festinger (1957) over the revisions to the theory that focused on the self-concept. Evidence of animal sentience, including dissonance reduction, may be a source of cognitive dissonance.

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