LSE is launching its new research centre in autumn 2025. The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience is made possible by the Jeremy Coller Foundation. LSE Philosophy Professor Jonathan Birch will be the inaugural Director of the new centre.

You can find the official announcement on the LSE website.

Please find some personal words from the new Director Professor Jonathan Birch about the centre and its mission below.

It’s a great responsibility and privilege to be directing the world’s first Centre for Animal Sentience, generously supported by the Jeremy Coller Foundation.

Britain has a long history of standing up for animal welfare. We had the world’s first anti-cruelty law in 1822; the RSPCA since 1824; the Vegetarian Society since 1847. We think of ourselves as a nation of animal lovers. But more recently we seem to have lost our sense of ambition.

Progress has stalled and is, in some areas, reversing. Industrialized, intensive, automated farming systems that have nothing to do with our traditional values, and no regard for other animals as sentient beings with lives of their own, have become commonplace. Farmed animals and farmers alike are becoming cogs in ferocious corporate machines that put profit before care, compassion and dignity.

A different vision of how we can relate to other species is needed. Our Centre, when it opens its doors in autumn 2025, won’t change everything overnight, but it can change the conversation in the UK and beyond—and help us rediscover who we are.

Our goal is to use of the emerging science of animal minds to design better policies, laws, and ways of caring for other animals. Our work will be directed towards ethical moonshots: ambitious, long-term impact targets that, if we achieve them, will put Britain back at the leading edge of animal welfare globally and help restore the harmonious relationship with other species that we all want and need. That mission will be at the heart of everything we do.

What unites us will not be any single discipline or methodology, but a shared research programme and a shared commitment to producing research that benefits all sentient life. We’ll be doing strongly interdisciplinary work that will connect with philosophy, veterinary medicine, evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, economics and law. Everything we do will be oriented towards achieving real-world change.

Our three initial priorities will be:

Let’s make a world where AI is used to benefit all animals, not to facilitate cruelty.

AI is already having huge impacts on other species, yet they are often forgotten

completely in discussions of AI governance, ethics and safety. That has to change.

Driverless cars need rules about how to minimize harm to pets and wildlife—what should they be? When chatbots are asked for instructions about how to exploit or abuse animals, what should they say? Tech giants are already funding start-ups building automated farming operations in which AI systems, not humans, monitor animals for health and welfare issues—what are the ethical pitfalls here? Does the human element in farming matter and, if it does, how can it be preserved?

With governments around the world taking an increasing interest in AI governance, now is the moment to accelerate efforts to promote the ethical use of AI in relation to other animals. That must mean limiting and constraining bad, exploitative uses—uses that harm other animals and humans. At the same time, it must mean supporting and incentivizing good, beneficial uses—such as decoding animal communication to better understand what animals want.

Let’s make a world in which all sentient beings are respected, even the smallest ones.

Animal welfare laws have traditionally overlooked invertebrates, leading to notoriously inhumane practices, such as dropping crabs and lobsters into pans of boiling water. Alexander Pope, in 1713, lamented the “outrageous” practice of cooking these animals alive—three centuries later, it goes on. My group’s work led to the recognition of these animals as sentient beings in the UK’s Animal (Welfare) Sentience Act 2022, and yet this hasn’t yet led to meaningful, on-the-ground change—more work remains to be done.

Meanwhile, invertebrates are farmed on a massive scale: shrimp aquaculture is a major established industry in India and South East Asia, controversial attempts to farm octopuses have led to protests and bans, while insect farming is growing fast in many countries, touted by its proponents as a sustainable source of feed for other kinds of farming—especially fish farming, where at present fishes are fed on other, ground-up fishes in a completely unsustainable way.

Britain aspires to be a leader and innovator in insect farming, but that must mean leading and innovating in welfare, too. Rather than saying “we know nothing about insect welfare, so let’s not talk about it”, we should say: “let’s assemble the evidence needed to construct world-leading codes of practice, and then, when we export technologies and techniques, we’ll export high welfare standards as well”. The new Centre will aim to close key evidence gaps and, simultaneously, keep the pressure on the industry to improve welfare standards.

Let’s make a world in which people are empowered to act in accordance with their love of other animals rather than being nudged towards indifference.

Even when we can all agree an animal is sentient—as with a pig or a chicken—this doesn’t mean we will treat it well. On the contrary, the dire welfare problems experienced by these animals in intensive conditions are well known. What explains the gap between our beliefs and values—our self-image as a nation of “animal lovers”—and these practices? What can be done to close that gap?

This is a question about human psychology, so we’ll study it with psychology experiments. Suppose you offer people a choice between lab-grown pet food (recently approved for sale in the UK) and meat pet food. What information about the lives of the animals used to make the latter will shift their choice, and why? At a time when we, as a society, need to rein in our meat consumption for multiple reasons, what is holding back the wider adoption of alternatives to meat? Our goal is to produce work that will shape the animal welfare labelling and public information campaigns of the future and provide an evidence base for effective animal advocacy.

As we grow over time, these priorities will be supplemented by new ones, but the shared mission to design better policies, laws, and ways of caring for animals will always remain. This will not be ivory tower research done for its own sake—we want to change the way humans relate to the rest of the natural world. Some might say this is an impossible dream, but the boundary between the ‘possible’ and the allegedly ‘impossible’ is one we aim to move.