What is it like to be a bee? Or a spider? Does a crab feel pleasure or pain? Behavioural and welfare science have moved on considerably in the past 20 years, but there is still a huge amount we don’t know about how animals actually feel – or, indeed, whether they all do.
‘I think it’s one of the great challenges facing science and philosophy in the 21st century,’ said Dr Jonathan Birch, a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. ‘It’s not purely something we can think of as science as usual … we need new ways of thinking about sentience.’