This quote may seem outdated when we consider both when it was said and what contradictory scientific evidence we have garnered since. “Animals are like robots: they cannot reason or feel pain” (Descartes, 1596–1650). Such information will not only be useful in supporting and initiating legislative amendments but will help to increase understanding, and potentially positive actions and attitudes towards animals. We found that there is a need for more research on positive emotional states in animals, and that there is still much to learn about taxa such as invertebrates. We drew conclusions on the implications for animal welfare science and argued for the importance of addressing these gaps in our knowledge. In this paper, we explored what has been published on animal sentience in the scientific literature and where the gaps in research lie. However, when we consider that much of the research found to accept and utilise animal sentience is performed for the development of human drugs and treatment, it appears that measuring sentience is, after all, not quite as impossible as was previously thought.
Why then is there so much scepticism surrounding the science of animal sentience? Sentience refers to the subjective states of animals, and so is often thought to be impossible to measure objectively. We discovered that very little was actually being explored, and instead there was already much agreement about what animals can feel. The list consisted of human emotions, terminology associated with animal sentience, and traits often thought to be indicative of subjective states.
Rather than attempting to extract meaning from the many complex and abstract definitions of animal sentience, we searched over two decades of scientific literature using a peer-reviewed list of 174 keywords. In this review, we examined what is being explored and discussed, regarding animal sentience, within the scientific literature. Knowledge of animal sentience is fundamental to many disciplines and imperative to the animal welfare movement.
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