Animals and pain

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Smudge777

I must ask: what the heck is the difference between ‘reacting to a stimulus’ and ‘experiencing pain’? It seems like scientists assume that a complex nervous system is a minimum requirement for pain, then use that assumption to assert that ‘therefore, insects/lobsters cannot feel pain’.

This question of sentience versus ‘instinct’ (more on that in a minute) is at the core of the problem both from an ethical and behaviorial standpoint, and the more we learn about neurophysiology across the entire kingdom of Animalia the more it is obvious that there is no clean dividing line. Any creature with complex learned behaviors (which includes entire classes of vertebrates and in vertebrates) has some apparent level of ‘self’, at least in the strict survival sense, any many animals clearly have fairly complex internal lives and needs which satisfy at least the first three tiers of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”, indicating a degree of sapience.

Whether a creature ‘feels’ pain and has the emotional response of fear or anxiety as a result is a question difficult to answer, but pain due to physiological stress or injury is not a conscious behavior; even in human patients who are have been paralyzed or in a coma, the brain registers the pain impulse and emits neurotransmitters accordingly. Nociceptors, the nerve receptors that detect pain, have been found in all classes of animal with a central nervous system of any kind. A response to pain may or may not be conscious, but the stress response of experiencing pain is built into the basic functions of the neurological system at a fundamental level.

In regard to the question of whether response to a harmful impulse indicates a cognitive sensation of pain as opposed to an instinctual, non-stressing response, this is really begging the question. It isn’t as if ‘pain’ and the associated internal experience of fear suddenly emerged in primates, or mammals, or even vertebrates. It is an evolutionary solution to equipping creatures with central nervous systems and any ability to make decisions over their behavior with a means to avoid potentially harmful circumstances. If it were not stressing it would be of no utility, and we’d all be like jellyfish, happy to float around and absorb nutrients, and then be eaten or broken apart with no awareness as to hazard or volition to avoid death. The ability to sense ‘pain’ as a fundamental environmental stressor and the associated nervious response is essentially fundamental to behavior.

The example of a simple robot which is programmed to avoid light is not really pertinent to the discussion as it is clearly the Mechanial Turk of stimulus and response; it does not ‘feel’ anything because there is no more complex nervous system or analogue to serve as a substrate for cognition of any kind, and is just following a relatively simple and discrete instruction set with little or no heuristic capability. Even the most simple creature with a networked nervous system such as the nudibranch (inaptly but commonly referred to as a “sea slug” even though many are stunningly beautiful creatures with sophisticated adaptations) is vastly more complicated in neurophysiology and behavior than even our most sophisticated robots.

As for inaccurate assumptions or claims in cognitive neuroscience, it should be understood that the field is really a relatively recent one in comparison to many sciences, including advanced sciences such as modern physics, molecular biology, or computer science. The fundamental tools to start working with even individual neurons or small networks at a functional level (e.g. on living organisms) only came about in the early ‘Seventies, and being able to actually assess brain states with any fidelity beyond measuring gross neural oscillations with the advent of PET and functional MRI scanning, and many knowledgeable people within the congitive neuroscience community believe that even this degree of resolution is insufficient to observe individual processes of cognition, and indeed, whether it is possible to identify discrete cognitive activity given that all behaviors and reported thought processes seem to activate most or all areas of the brain to a significant degree.

There are a lot of assumptions and commonly repeated factoids in neurophysiology and cognitive neuroscience that barely rise to the level of urban myth despite the fact that they are commonly held by experts in the field as discussed by Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel in this excellent Brain Science Podcast episode, which demonstrates just how complicated and disjointed the discipline of neuroscience is. (It’s still better grounded in demonstratable fact than psychology, though.) Anything you hear, even from a leading expert in the field, should be treated as informed speculation rather than hard fact at any level above basic physiology of neurons, and even that is subject to constant revision as we learn of new ways neurons adapt and function.

Stranger

[Broomstick]

@Wesley_Clark

My understanding is most of our emotions come from the limbic system, but I don’t know what kind of emotional life social non-mammals have.

Parrot keepers have no doubt those birds have emotions - they’re ALL about emotions. Of course, birds are not mammals, they are very different from mammals, and how they express themselves from verbally to body language is also very different than mammals. One of the problems of keeping such birds is that you do not intuitively understand their body language the way you would, say, a dog’s - you have to learn on an intellectual level what their postures and such mean, and apply your intellect to how your birds are acting that day. Which means I’m not at all surprised that people doubt the emotional lives of parrots.

Bird’s brains also have a very different structure than mammal brains do, which I think also used to de-rail folks in the past. They assumed that a creature had to have a mammal-like brain structure, or even a human-like brain structure, to have comparable intellect and emotions. The example of birds would seem to say no, you don’t, that there is more than one way to organize a brain.

And I keep saying “parrots” as opposed to “birds” because there are birds that operate on a very unsophisticated, non-social level, just as certain mammals could be so described. Other social birds, such as crows and ravens, likewise have intelligence and emotions.

[j666]

Other animals might lack pain receptors. I think some humans do. Animals that pull away from a stimulus might be responding to touch or pressure, not necessarily pain.

And I am perfectly happy to kill my lobster before boiling it, as long as someone can tell me a way that has been proven to hurt less.

[running_coach]

@j666

Other animals might lack pain receptors. I think some humans do. Animals that pull away from a stimulus might be responding to touch or pressure, not necessarily pain.

And I am perfectly happy to kill my lobster before boiling it, as long as someone can tell me a way that has been proven to hurt less.

How to Humanely Kill a Lobster for Cooking

There are a few ways to kill a lobster before putting in the pot. First is freezing—placing the lobster in the freezer an hour before cooking will do the trick. Another option, and a quicker one, is to plunge the tip of a sharp knife straight down right behind the lobster’s eyes.

And then there are those who believe a combination of the two is best: after freezing for 30 minutes, place the lobster on its back on a cutting board. Then angle the tip of a chef’s knife right below where the claws meet and swiftly cut down through the head. The legs will continue to move a bit afterward but the lobster is in fact dead.

If you don’t want to go through any of these steps, put the lobster in the pot of boiling water head-first, which should kill it pretty much instantly.

[j666]

@running_coach

How to Humanely Kill a Lobster for Cooking

How do we KNOW this causes the lobster less pain? Did they identify norioceptors in lobsters and monitor them firing during these different techniques?

More importantly, why on earth would I freeze a fresh lobster? That’s just incomprehensible to me.

(We used to put them to sleep by stroking the vagus nerve until they stopped moving.)

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Crazyhorse

The robot analogy doesn’t work when discussing the subjective feelings of living things. You could argue that humans are also just having a nervous system response to a stimulus when we wail and groan in agony from something very painful.

There is, in fact, no evidence that all mental processes, including those of higher cognition, are anything but a “nervous system response to a stimulus”. Consciousness and the more fundamental, so-called ‘unconcious’ processes governing behavior (but above autonomous processes that keep the heart beating and the endocrine glands in balance) appear to be nothing more than emergent processes of a very complex system. In fact, when the brain is denied outside stimulus, it starts to produce its own in the form of auditory, visual, proprioceptive, and sometimes even tactile hallucinations as anyone who has spent time in a sensory deprivation tank can attest to.

The human or primate brain is not particularly special other than the degree of encephalization (size or number of neurons in the cereberal cortex in proportion with body mass) as all mammalian brains have similar features and layouts even if neurophysiologists have referred to them by different terms or ascribed different functions. And frankly, a lot of cognitive scientists are coming to the notion that many of our supposed conscious decisions are just rationalizations of ‘unconcious’ behaviorial impulses. That most of the decisions we make in life are not the result of logical or directed thought processes is unpalatable to many, but does explain why our behavior on a societal and often level is so often at odds with what an objective observer would choose.

@Wesley_Clark

There is a connection between social animals and better brains because social animals need bigger brains to navigate the complexities of social life. The smartest animals tend to be social.

My understanding is most of our emotions come from the limbic system, but I don’t know what kind of emotional life social non-mammals have.

According to this, birds have a limbic system. But I thought that was only in mammals. I’m not sure how that works.

Animals need more complex brains (in particular those features associated with perception and behavioral prediction) to be social, but bigger, in terms of pure volume, size, or even gyrification (the ‘folding’ of the cerebral cortex that creates the characteristic wrinkles) is an assumption that is challenged by more recent work in both mammal and non-mammal cognitive neuroscience. Birds have small overall brain volume and somewhat lower encephalization, and have a very low gyrification index, so the historical assumption has been that they are not very smart or that their intelligence is limited to very specific areas of function despite the high problem solving and heuristic capability demonstrated by many corvids and psittacines, including being able to mimic human speech (in some parrots so precisely as to be indistinguishable from human) and play complex games involving planning and deception. Anyone who believes that the more intelligent species of these birds do not have emotions and interior experience is speaking from blithe ignorance.

Other species of animals wholly unassociated with primates or even mammals also demonstrate behavior indicative of complex internal function, including elephants, donkeys, various marine mammals and many species of cephalopods. While their brain organization, functionality, and (in the case of molluscs, nervous system layout and cortex organization) diverges significantly from primates, both the complexity of their neurological system and sophistication of behavior indicates high intelligence and very likely a signficant degree of self-awareness and internal processes of consciousness, including emotion and anticipation.

Stranger

[Blue_Blistering_Barnacle]

@Wesley_Clark

Just because a lifeform can avoid noxious stimuli doesn’t mean it consciously feels pain. The neurology necessary to be capable of pain and to plan around it is pretty advanced, and most lifeforms don’t have it.

My understanding is that only vertebrates can feel physical pain, and only mammals can feel emotional pain.

Advanced social animals like humans, dolphins, elephants, etc probably also have psychic pain, the ability to feel guilt about the past or fear of the future. I’m guessing a lot of mammals lack that ability to worry about the future or get stuck in the past. I’d assume only social animals can feel shame, but I am just guessing.

Basically the more advanced your brains get, the more kinds of pain you are capable of.

Any dog owner can attest that dogs feel psychic pain (or at least mightily appear to feel it).

They do worry about things.

for example: My dog loves to come down with me to the basement, to chew a bone and watch me exercise or watch TV. She would not come down with me for a week after I gave her a thorough bath in the basement bathtub. I had to practically drag her down the first few times after just to prove to her that I wasn’t going to bathe her; now she’s happy coming down with me again. (Now my wife is telling me that she needs a bath, my daughter, the dog whisperer is gone to school, and I’m not sure what to do, except wait until my wife breaks down and handles it.)

On the bird side of things, my old college roommate had a mackaw who would “act out” after he came back from weekend skiing trips.

[Wesley_Clark]

I’m not a neuroscientist, I’m just repeating rules of thumbs I’ve learned over the years from reading about affective neuroscience.

[ul]
[li]Only vertebrates feel physical pain[/li]
[li]Only animals with a limbic system feel emotional pain (I was under the impression only mammals have a limbic system, but as was mentioned earlier I guess some birds evolved their own limbic systems). [/li]
[li]Many animals that can feel emotional pain probably cannot feel pain by thinking about the past or the future. They possibly only feel emotional pain in the moment. [/li]
[li]Social animals are more intelligent.[/li][/ul]

I’m not sure how much of those rules of thumb are true or not.

[Crazyhorse]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

There is, in fact, no evidence that all mental processes, including those of higher cognition, are anything but a “nervous system response to a stimulus”. Consciousness and the more fundamental, so-called ‘unconcious’ processes governing behavior (but above autonomous processes that keep the heart beating and the endocrine glands in balance) appear to be nothing more than emergent processes of a very complex system. In fact, when the brain is denied outside stimulus, it starts to produce its own in the form of auditory, visual, proprioceptive, and sometimes even tactile hallucinations as anyone who has spent time in a sensory deprivation tank can attest to.

The human or primate brain is not particularly special other than the degree of encephalization (size or number of neurons in the cereberal cortex in proportion with body mass) as all mammalian brains have similar features and layouts even if neurophysiologists have referred to them by different terms or ascribed different functions. And frankly, a lot of cognitive scientists are coming to the notion that many of our supposed conscious decisions are just rationalizations of ‘unconcious’ behaviorial impulses. That most of the decisions we make in life are not the result of logical or directed thought processes is unpalatable to many, but does explain why our behavior on a societal and often level is so often at odds with what an objective observer would choose.

I agree. My point wasn’t that our response isn’t driven by our nervous system but that even though it is we ‘suffer’ when we’re in pain and some degree of that suffering is driven by conscious thought. I think that is really what someone is asking when they ask if animals feel pain.

What has been questioned is whether or not they suffer, at a level higher than necessary to facilitate an avoidance response, as we do. If we touch a hot stove our hand reacts much quicker than our conscious thought, but very shortly after reflexively avoiding the source of the pain we suffer. We lament the pain, we wonder if it will leave a scar, or if it will prevent us from ever playing the piano again, etc. That all combines with the physical pain of the event. It is debatable whether or not these higher thoughts are mere reflections of instinct or whatever you would call it or products of our higher consciousness.

In general I am inclined to believe that we are not nearly as separate or different from the rest of the natural world as many of us believe us to be. It is quite odd to me in fact that there would even be any question in anyone’s mind whether or not an animal in pain suffers. Of course they do. And at the deepest level all of it, human and animal, is driven by hardwired nervous system responses to stimuli. But that isn’t incompatible with my theory that we also attach additional importance to pain than most of our animal relatives do not and that adds to the ‘suffering’ we experience as a result of pain.

[md2000]

One thing I remember hearing about skateboarding…

Teenagers don’t feel pain the way we do.

[running_coach]

@md2000

One thing I remember hearing about skateboarding…

Teenagers don’t feel pain the way we do.

Like other lower lifeforms, they don’t remember pain.

[Broomstick]

Some pretty primitive critters can nonetheless learn to avoid situations involving pain. Certainly fish, lizards, mammals and birds can learn to avoid objects and actions that cause pain. So animals can anticipate, to some degree, that doing X or Y can cause pain.

[DPRK]

@running_coach

Like other lower lifeforms, they don’t remember pain.

If you were skateboarding and took enough of a blow to the head, I imagine your memory of the event might not be 100% either…

[gigi]

@Crazyhorse

The question isn’t and has never really been if other animals ‘feel’ pain. Of course they do. The argument some have put forth is that not having the higher reasoning capacity that humans have it just isn’t as big of a deal to them as it is for us. We are able to think: “I’m in pain. This is bad. This means an injury or illness. Oh the pain. Oh woe is me. ouch ouch ouch” etc. Simple life forms don’t seem to have the capacity to experience that kind of emotional response to pain.

Right, to me that’s the distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is pain but suffering is remembering when it didn’t used to be that way, wondering why this is happening to me, and worrying about whether it will always remain that way, and how to get help, and how will this affect me and those I care about.

[buddha_david]

As others have said, the question shouldn’t be whether or not animals feel pain, but at what level that pain becomes debilitating to them.

There was a very good post on this board (which unfortunately I haven’t been been able to find – the post that is, not the board) which touched on this subject. Basically, animals appear to have a much higher pain tolerance than humans, simply by the fact that animals are very good at disguising pain. This is because showing symptoms of pain makes them vulnerable to predators, so evolution has selected for traits that make even extreme pain more tolerable.

Humans, on the other hand, have evolved differently. As a top-tier species with no predators to speak of, as well as having a highly developed social system, “we” can afford to allow pain to debilitate us. A gazelle limping around with a broken leg will find itself as dinner very quickly – whereas a human with a paper cut can afford to fall on the ground thrashing and screaming, because he/she can expect to be quickly surrounded by other humans who are willing to lend aid. Ergo, humans feel physical pain more severely than animals, merely because there aren’t many evolutionary pressures to select against low pain tolerance.

Now, there’s another sensation – fear. Humans are fairly adept at dealing with fear, heck we even watch movies or ride roller coasters specifically to invoke fear. Compare that to animals, who tend to completely lose their shit in a fear situation; the well-known “deer in the headlights” look. Fear can incapacitate an animal much more severely than pain can.

So the moral is, if you want to torture an animal, don’t try and injure it – try scaring the bejeebus out if it instead.

[Francis_Vaughan]

One can observe a range of behaviours that support this viewpoint

Watch a young child walking along, trip, and fall. Often you will see them stop, look about, and if there is a parent within sight, light up wailing. But of there isn’t any sympathy to hand they are far more stoic, and typically just pick themselves up and continue. One would assume that in social animals - where there might be some value in seeking attention you might see a different response to pain or just a general shock.

I was always a bit concerned to discover just how much pain my cats would suffer under before there was any obvious distress manifested. It took a problem that was actually debilitating before they would act anything other than normal. They will however scream like a banshee under some circumstances.

[j666]

I think we need a comparative neurophysiologist here. People seem to be conflating several different uses of the word “pain”.

To the best of my understanding, pain is a specific neurophysiological response, arising stimulation of specific types of neurons. Animals feel pain if they have these neurons. whether or not they have limbic system or strong social organization. That, by definition, is pain. Of course, I could be wrong.

But I disagree with just about everything in buddha_david’s post. I think there is more natural philosophy than science there.

Most agree that pain exists to enable animals to avoid damage; being able to ignore pain is not good for the individual or, more importantly, the group. Evidence of damage, pain, allows predators to pick out the weakest in the herd; that is good for the predator and the herd. Evolution would select for pain.

I don’t know that humans evolved as top-tier predators. One could argue most evolution was driven by weaknesses, rather than strengths.
I don’t know that humans have stronger social systems than all other “higher” animals, though they might be more complex.
I don’t know that humans are more protective of injured individuals. In fact, I truly doubt that. I think humans are very prone to attack the weak and injured.

For every deer in the headlights, there is a wolf bounding into the darkness and a cat lashing out and snarling. Fear inspires fight and flight as well as freezing in animals.
(I do think humans might be unique in how much the response varies among individuals, but that’s another topic. I think.)

[Enola_Straight]

Are we talking about pain, or suffering?

Pain is merely a neural impulse to tell your brain you’ve been injured.

Suffering is the emotional/psychological…even inter-social manner in which we deal with pain.
It has been noted that individuals without “feelings”…psychopaths/sociopaths…can take a lot of pain.

Do Autistics display a different level of pain response?

[Chronos]

Humans are likely to attack the weak among “them”. But we shelter and protect the weak among “us”. The differences are just in where you draw the line between “us” and “them”.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Enola_Straight

It has been noted that individuals without “feelings”…psychopaths/sociopaths…can take a lot of pain.

Do Autistics display a different level of pain response?

Neither sociopaths nor people on the autistic spectrum lack feelings and internal emotional states. Sociopaths are incapable of empathy (compassion for others) and autistic people have a limited ability to control their expression of emotion or understand the mental states of other people, but both classes of people have emotions just like anyone else. Emotion is not some tacked on feature of higher cognition or a uniquely human virtue; it is a part of the predictive intuition that allows creatures with complex neural systems (i.e. brains) to learn and anticipate even in absence of complete information about a threat or challenge.

Stranger