An emotional day - I can announce I'll be the first director of The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE, supported by a £4m grant from the Jeremy Coller Foundation. Our mission: to develop better policies, laws and ways of caring for animals. (1/2)
https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2025/c-March/LSE-centre-animal-sentience
https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2025/c-March/LSE-centre-animal-sentience
Comments
I’m so gratified that science is finally catching up with those who live with/close to animals have intuited for centuries- animals are soulful beings. No, they don’t think the same way we do. But they feel.
Will look forward to following your work!
octopus wrangler
congratulations!
B) Congrats!!
C) One of my pet projects (on the backburner...) is opposing the first-ever octopus farms (invented by Nueva Pescanova in 2019, not yet approved). Any comment on if/when the centre might engage with specific debates like that one?
At least, it seems morally intuitive that we should extend empathy to other species in some proportion to their capacity to exhibit same - including the hard-to-ascertain emotional aspect (perhaps discounting temptation to anthropomorphize survival instincts).
I was discussing animal sentience w students this Wed & one of them said that the relative neglect of the topic in the history of Euro-American philosophy can only be explained because of our feeling of guilt if we considered them sentient and didn't change our behaviour