Do animals feel pain?
Summary
Yes. The scientific consensus, formalized in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012) and reinforced by the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (2024), is that mammals, birds, and many other animals possess the neurological substrates necessary for conscious experience, including the capacity to feel pain.
Evidence Summary
The question of whether animals feel pain has been answered with increasing confidence by neuroscience over the past several decades. In 2012, a prominent group of neuroscientists gathered at the University of Cambridge and issued the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking. The Declaration stated that "the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.