Animal Sentience

Animal ethics

Bernard Rollin of Colorado State University, the principal author of two U.S. federal laws regulating pain relief for animals, writes that researchers remained unsure into the 1980s as to whether animals experience pain, and veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were simply taught to ignore animal pain. In his interactions with scientists and other veterinarians, Rollin asserts that he was regularly asked to prove animals are conscious and provide scientifically acceptable grounds for claiming they feel pain. The denial of animal consciousness by scientists has been labelled as mentophobia by Donald Griffin. Academic reviews of the topic are equivocal, noting that the argument that animals have at least simple conscious thoughts and feelings has strong support, but some critics continue to question how reliably animal mental states can be determined. A refereed journal Animal Sentience launched in 2016 by the Institute of Science and Policy of The Humane Society of the United States is devoted to research on this and related topics.