Many questions about animal welfare involve the affective states of animals (pain, fear, distress) and people look to science to clarify these issues as a basis for practices, policies and standards. However, the science of the mid twentieth century tended to be silent on matters of animal affect for both philosophical and methodological reasons. Philosophically, under the influence of Positivi...

For certain animals, the capability to interpret and anticipate on another animal’s behaviour may be crucial for survival. To this end, as is often claimed informally, an animal may apply a Theory of Mind to estimate what the other animal has on its mind. This paper uses a formal BDI-based agent model for Theory of Mind to formalise and simulate such a situation. The model uses BDI-concepts to ...