It's Time to Celebrate Animal Sentience and Stop Squabbling | Psychology Today

Posted January 14, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

Being sentient means having the ability to feel. A large body of scientific evidence stemming from studies of diverse species clearly shows that many nonhuman animals (animals) are sentient beings.1 These studies also show that the biodiversity of sentience is large and growing, and insects are finding themselves living well within the sentience arena as full members of the sentience club. Research shows that the emotional lives of insects are richer than many of us have ever imagined—not just in the ever-popular bees, but also in flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites too. (Darwin himself thought this! In 1872, he wrote that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy, and love.”)2

A growing number of people, including academics and non-academics, are very interested in what animals think and feel. Two recent posts—"The Eclectic Father of Cognitive Ethology" about Donald Griffin's seminal work and an interview with Jonathan Birch titled "The Edge of Sentience: Why Drawing Lines Is So Difficult"—have generated a good number of emails asking me to say more about the study of animal minds (the field called cognitive ethology) and animal sentience.

These handwritten words were sent to me by Jane Goodall in 2000 after she attended a wildlife management meeting in Arusha, Tanzania. What caught my eye about her message was how she capitalized the word "feelings." This was some years before the field of compassionate conservation emerged and began growing in leaps and bounds. In compassionate conservation, the life of every individual is valued, and sentience—their ability to feel—comes to the fore.

Studying animal sentience, consciousness, and emotion isn't easy. Future data from comparative analyses of animal cognition, along with existing information, should help us along in developing what some people think the field of cognitive ethology needs: namely, an integrative model or theory. Perhaps it was the lack of an integrative theory of cognitive ethology and the presence of one in evolutionary biology that led many people to dismiss tenuous cognitive ethological explanations while accepting often equally tenuous evolutionary stories.

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