Animal Sentience (journal)


Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary academic journal. Its subject matter, animal sentience, concerns what animals think and feel, and the journal also covers methods through which scientists and scholars can study this and make the information available to the general public. The journal is published by the Institute for Science and Policy of The Humane Society of the United States, and the editor-in-chief is Stevan Harnad, founder of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

History

The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, led to many scientists acknowledging that animals other than humans can feel subjectively and experience qualia. In response to this, in 2014, the Institute for Science and Policy decided to create a peer-reviewed journal focused on animal sentience.
Animal Sentience launched in 2015; its first issue appeared in 2016, and one of its articles, which asserted that fishes feel pain, received media attention.

Publication model

All articles accepted for publication are open to Open Peer Commentary, in which multiple researchers may submit mini-articles criticizing, clarifying, or elaborating on the article from the viewpoint of any research field relevant to its content.