The behavioural cue of ‘flexible self-protection’ is a way to establish whether an animal feels pain, scientists say
Crickets that received the hot probe “overwhelmingly” directed their attention to the affected antenna – they groomed it more frequently, and tended to it over a longer period of time, he says. “They weren’t just agitated and flustered. They were directing their attention to the actual antennae that was hit with this hot probe.”
I didn’t need a paper for that.
Dude what is this news? Of COURSE insects feel pain? A child can see this clearly, as I did when I was a young’un. They twitch and scurry when injured or burned. Don’t ask. Anyway.
Why would they be different from animals and FISH that was apparently news as well, that they feel pain and anxiety when caught and killed. Oh and crayfish and lobster when boiled alive 😂😂😂 why wouldn’t they feel pain? It just seems so stupid to me to assume they wouldn’t.
Here I thought we already knew this and did it anyway because… We gotta eat, right? Animals kill and eat barely-even-dead prey all the time, it’s just nature, right??
But I grew up and learned humans don’t think other animals feel pain whatsoever. Like bruh wuuuut??? Whatchu think was going on?!
I don’t know whether they do or not but they have very primitive nervous systems and just responding to bodily trauma or negative stimuli does not inherently imply feeling pain
Hopefully an advanced race doesn’t put you in a room, break your shit, and say the same thing to each other.
But the fact that they do, just like we do, should be an indication of them feeling pain, so I don’t understand why people would assume the opposite. They have made every indication of feeling pain before we knew about nervous systems and all this modern stuff, so I really don’t get it.
But they are literally not like us. They don’t have blood have exo skeletons.
That’s not really relevant to the topic here.
They do but not like mammals do. Injury occurs, their nervous system responds, but their “brain” does not register it to the same degree it would in animals with more evolved brains. This video is a good example of the processing power of insect “brains”. The mantis is processing “eat” and the pain of being gnawed in half simply can’t over power the drive to eat. There’s not a mammal or bird that would ignore being chewed in half just because it was enjoying a succulent meal. Recognizing that different animals process pain in a way different from others is not license to disregard their pain or lessen the suffering, it’s just acknowledging that different systems process hurting in a different manner.
Very interesting video, and also super gross, yuck.
Makes me curious if all insects can be this oblivious in similar experiments.
It’s the same people who argue against plants being living things.
I really don’t get it bro 😂
People claim fish don’t feel pain to feel better about torturing and eating them. So that is not ahocking at all to me
When I was in med school assisting in circumcisions (didn’t want to, had to) the doctor said that the baby screaming was not proof that he felt pain, and demonstrated it by poking the baby and showing that he cried as a response to that. Absolutely nonsensical for a supposedly intelligent person to say. The cry was vastly different from the circ and a poke. It was an excuse not to use local anesthesia or justify the whole process I guess.
The funny part is that that when I was on OBGYN at a different hospital, and when I was at my home hospital on peds, the pediatricians did circumcisions. So I got twice as many circumcisions as my classmates. Some of them could have theoretically attended zero if their schedule was flipped and they were on peds at the OBGYN circumcising hospital and on OBGYN at the peds circumcising hospital. I can’t understand why someone would claim someone else doesn’t feel pain. I wish we had a machine that could make someone feel for a second what you feel so that it stops being minimized or disbelieved.I mean no offense, but some Dr’s are wild. It’s not just babies who are faking pain, but also women and POC. My husband was given the same pain meds/schedule for a cut on his thumb that I was for childbirth with a second degree tear. He was given even better pain meds the time we went in for a “mystery pain” in his chest that they could find no evidence of.
I know about this as a phenomena, but even with already knowing, the specific comparison stories are always so wtffff…. So sorry you/y’all experience that, it’s hot trash.
Now whose putting human emotions on a bug. They are not small humans and do not have the same emotions.
I’m not talking about emotions. Pain is not an emotion. Pain is a sensation.
Ok, now do sponges. Is it obvious sponges feel pain? How can you tell it’s obvious?
I don’t know anything at all about sponges. Never held one, never seen a live one in nature.
🤷♂️
Come to think about it, ive never seen one in nature either. Are sponges even real?
Prolly not, right
well fuck. What other lies have they pushed on us? Is earth even flat? I bet its not even on a turtle back drifting through space. Im so lost and confused.
The turtles are real, just not holding up the earth. Saw that shit on that newly leaked cartoon Avatar The last Airbender movie. They’re there.
oh thank fuck. For a minute there i was starting to question my entire understanding of reality and the world as we know it. Whew Praise be to turtle.
It’s tick season, I’m using bug spray…
Agreed. Went backpacking with my dog last weekend, who is on Simparica AND was treated with permethrin 2 weeks prior, and that little shit STILL ended up with 3-4 dozen ticks on him. He’s a golden, so meticulously going through his fur removing them was a long annoying process for both of us. Thankfully they were all dead because of the insecticides. There is zero chance I’m not using bug sprays. Ticks are out in full force and I have zero sympathy for them. With as many diseases as they carry, it’s a me or them scenario, and it’s not going to be me.
“Feel” is something that requires consciousness and a sense of awareness that the pain being experienced is self-related. Consciousness requires complex systems and a nervous system which insects do not possess. Whilst reactive and reflexive actions are performed, whether they experience pain as a personal subjective phenomenon is something that isn’t tested. Reaction isn’t a proxy to consciousness.
Would a bacteria “feel” pain because it reacts to the environment?
I say this as someone that has almost a Buddhist approach to respecting living creatures. However, the science of consciousness and a physicalist approach inform my views.
You really, really don’t want to bring consciousness theory to what is essentially a phenomenology fight.
Trying to bring the difference between nocioception, experience of pain and having a subjective experience of pain. Different physical and emotional phenomena.
Does a crab look like it’s feeling pain when it yanks one of its claws out? Mostly seems unphased and it has a far more complex biology than an insect.
You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about in regard to crabs or anything else
Does it matter whether pain is felt “as a personal subjective phenomenon”? It’s still pain. Maybe I’m unclear on what exactly that phrase means.
For example, when under anesthesia and having skin pricked without being made aware/conscious that the skin has been damaged and the body is working to restore it. This would be viewed as “feeling” pain as the body adjusts and focuses resources in addressing it. However, the experience of pain was not possible due to lack of awareness impeding a conscious representation of reality.
Doesn’t anaesthesia mean that the pain signal that would be transmitted via nerves to the brain is suppressed? I don’t see how that could be viewed as feeling pain.
Yes, exactly my point. How can an insect feel pain when they’re devoid of the complex machinery that allows them to have pain emotion and connect the pain experience to a self.
I took more issue with the use of “feel” as that’s normally associated with a human experience of feeling. An insect lacks “hardware” to approximate a human experience of feeling.
Also the fact that bug’s are silently going extinct and nobody cares to notice, seriously stick your head out the window right now and listen, that is a silent apocalypse my friend.
I wish some bugs would go extinct, bed bugs, mosquitos, ticks, maybe yellow jackets. Seems like those populations are strong than ever.
75% decline of flying insects population in germany
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/insect-decline-germany/
For what it’s worth, my totally non scientific personal experience is that in Denmark, the number of insects that I have to clean off the car has trended upwards in the last two years
I could make aong crazy post about this. This is bad. I wanted to be an entomologist my whole childhood and i consider myself an amateur one. There are no bugs. Where there should be ants and earthworms, there are none. After a rain worms should be all over the place, the castings should be found everywhere. I keep looking and they are not there. I went to at least 20 lakes last summer in my canoe fishing with my kid and looked for aquatic insects. There are none. So there are so small fish. So there are no big fish. I just went all over florida just last week, i saw a couple of butterflies. No mosquitos, no ants, no spiders, no anything. Every year my building is really close to lake erie and gets covered in insects in the spring, havent seen a single one. I keep looking and haven’t found anything.
When I was a child my dad’s garden was full of all kinds of butterflies. Then the ownership of the field on the other side of road changed and almost from one day to the other they were all gone and never returned.
They didn’t like the new owner and moved out?
I remember road trips in the summer, in the 90’s, where you’d just see a bunch of bugs splatter on your windshield, and where you’d have to periodically scrub them off with windshield scrubbers.
Now, 25+ years later, I almost never see bugs on bumpers and hoods and side mirrors. Certainly not to the same degree.
And I can believe that computer aided design helped make all cars much more aerodynamic so that fewer bugs would actually be hit and more would slip into the airflow around the car, but the sheer magnitude of the dropoff makes it totally obvious that there are just fewer insects around.
Yes. It’s one of the most likely apocalypse scenarios.
Here’s to hope enough manage to evolve fast enough to adapt to the human poisoning of the word. Because that’s the only viable path I can see. That humans manage to change fast enough is highly unlikely
I’m not sticking my head out the window right now. It’s covered with termites.
I opened the window and a wasp came in.
Now I’m selling my house.
If it bites me I’m killing it, self defense. I don’t care about its pain. It doesn’t care about mine.
Well, since catch and release for insects is failboat, and managing an infestation of anything is a health hazard, bug spray ain’t going anywhere, pain or not
Like mice, you can acknowledge something feels pain and still need to deal with pest type problems related to it (ideally in a targeted and humane manner). But it may affect some other things for the better such as mandatory killing of crustaceans before boiling, acceptable procedures for invertebrate animal research, eliminating use of live insects for fishing bait, etc.
mice are too destructive, bites everything, even wires, pees and poops everwhere it can.
We could modify what’s in the spray to reduce the pain while the bugs die. Animal welfare is still quite relevant when you have to kill them.
dont care
Nobody asked
Noooo 😭 the poor cricket’s antennae…
If the most powerful people in the world don’t have to care about the suffering they cause to hundreds of millions then I’m not going to be shamed into caring about insect’s supposed subjective experience of pain.
What sets us apart from the psychopaths is that we care about the pain we inflict on innocents, no matter how small.
shame? I would argue the embracing empathy part is more pertinent.
Nature probably invented poison long before empathy. They both have their places among us.
Nature invented diseases that would kill you by the time you’re 30 and yet I don’t see you running naked outside to go die. Nature has never been something to follow, and especially not morally.
I lovr how there are a half dozen or so "well obviously duh’ comments in here each with a half dozen or so replies all stating ‘well not so obviously’
Pain would cause an animal to flee. Why wouldn’t every living thing have some sort of pain tolerance?
“Hey, Bill! Look! Look at this cricket when I stick its antenna with the hot probe! Look! See what it does? Look, I’ll do it again. Doesn’t like it, does it? I’ll just check it again. Nope! Wow! That reaction was a doozy! Hey, go get Eileen! She’d wanna see this, too! Hey, buddy! Here comes the hot probe … !”
Why would any animated being run away from danger if it didn’t feel pain? It should be assumed that animals feel pain. Pain keeps them away from danger, so they survive, and evolve with those pain genes. For plants however, whether they have pain genes or not doesn’t matter for their survival so they evolve either way.
I don’t think tending to damage is enough to prove pain.
Microbes detect and move away from danger. Plants detect danger and react to defend themselves. They also redirect resources to heal. Pain isn’t necessary for this.
Pain is for learning, so you avoid what caused the pain. Beings that don’t learn shouldn’t feel pain, it would just be a waste of energy. That’d only happen in evolutionary quirks (ie loss of capacity to learn after gaining pain). Nature is cruel (grasshoppers get their heads eaten during mating) but not just for the sake of it.
And of course, there’s humans that have a condition that makes them not feel pain. They still learn self preservation, and they have some reflexes too.
The article makes the comparison with a hurt dog. Dogs remember for life what hurt them. It’s very obvious they learn from pain.
Pain is a detection of danger. If burning felt good, microbes, plants and animals wouldn’t turn away.
Your body does a whole bunch of things in reaction to danger that don’t register as pain. Sweating, contracting pupils, releasing insuline…
You could get philosophical and say that these are pains of your body’s subsystems. And if microbes can feel pain then your body functions on the misery of billions of beings trapped inside of you. Not really something you can build a morality on.
