Reddit reviews Sentience and Animal Welfare

I mean, wow, uh... I wish I had some for you? This is just based on years of interest in the concept of 'sentience,' human nature, self-agency, intellectual ethics...

Anything dealing with the moral issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence can easily be applied to near-sentient or possibly-sentient animals, for the same reasons. There is a wealth of material exploring this problem in terms of AI, everything from the Star Trek TNG episode The Measure of a Man to Asimov and Gibson.

A quick google search turned up a textbook entitled Sentience and Animal Welfare, but I don't know anything about it or the author, so I can't recommend it.

If you want to go down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, start with either the mirror self-recognition test, sentience, or Great Ape personhood and work through the links from there.

I'll look around a bit more and see if something strikes me as a seminal work on the subject.

EDIT: More wikipedia rabbit hole. Read up on:

Kanzi

Chantek

Koko

Both are very specific examples which are hard to objectively prove, and which even if I did find sources for I am sure somebody could find a contradictory source for. However, given a fruit fly has only about 250k neurons it would be nothing short of miraculous if they are able to perform all of their necessary functions and feel emotion. Anecdotally I have seen chickens show no compassion for other chickens at all - they peck at the weakened until they die and keep pecking. Anybody who has kept chickens will have observed the same.

Regardless of these specific examples my core point stands. Animal welfare policies and discussion are heavily based around sentience, which is a product of intelligence. People have written entire books on this if you feel like reading about it.

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sentience-Animal-Welfare-Donald-Broom/dp/1780644043
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Animals-Ethics-Trade-Challenge-Sentience/dp/184407255X/
  
  It's even a hot topic in politics right now - https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/animal-sentience-brexit-vote-caroline-lucas-michael-gove-truth-fact-argument-a8072071.html
  
  What I'm getting at here is that this is a colossal ongoing debate and we aren't going to find the answer here. I personally think that it's absurd to think that an amoeba can suffer in the same capacity as a chimpanzee - and if you agree with that then you agree that at some level of intelligence, suffering becomes a thing. I would go a step further and say the capacity to suffer scales with intelligence.