i did a bit of searching on cockroaches, and they’re all over the internet too! help! i dread the day they start crawling all over my screen, from the inside.
Maybe so, Ginger, but scholars have identified many additions and insertion put into the Bible for what seem to be purposes of persuasion to a particular point of view. The passage you quote might be one of those put in by some human because it looks obviously self-serving to me.
So suppose you’re swimming in the Gulf of Mexico when a school of Dolphins starts to frolic around you and gets saltwater in your Piña Colada. You happen to have a speargun with you that they were giving away free with purchase of two floats and a Vanilla Coke at the nearby Tourist Shack. Does Genesis give you permission to smite the dolphins (that sounds like a euphemism, doesn’t it? though anytime you verb a noun it sounds like a euphemism) with impunity?
Is Genesis a scriptural basis for cowtipping?
In a former apartment of mine, there used to be this one kind of weird many-legged bug, about an inch long, that would sometimes appear on the wall at night. If you sprayed something like 409 on one, it would quickly run away but leave behind 10 or 15 individual legs that would wriggle frantically for a while. Not that this has anything to do with the OP, but hey, it’s not every day I get a chance to mention this in casual conversation.
When it comes to creepy-crawlies, how would we even define pain and determine whether it’s being experienced? One method is the step test. With a cat, you step on its tail and it lets loose with a “MeeYOWWWW!!!”, from which we can reasonably ascertain that the cat has experienced pain. Unfortunately, this method does work with roaches, slugs, and other small critters, and really should not be tried anyway if you’re wearing a nice pair of shoes.
As the sadistic GopherGod72 mentioned, if you chop a “hunnybee” (love that spelling, btw) in half, it’ll keep on going about its normal nectar-gathering activities; at least until, presumably, it realizes it can’t fly properly anymore, at which point it must surely experience a severe emotional trauma and eventually die from the shock. But is this pain?
My 20-year-old paperback dictionary (always a good source for concise scientific definitions), defines pain in the following ways:
With our maimed hunnybee, what we seem to have is pain #3, not because it felt pain #1 or pain #2 when its abdomen was unexpectedly removed, but because of the anguish it experienced at having lost such an important body part. Just think how you would feel if you lost your abdomen.
But what about pain #1 and pain #2. I am not a scientist, but those two definitions look awfully similar to me, so let’s just say they’re both the same. In other words, what we’re talking about here is bodily suffering or distress. Here we can detect our familiar mind/body duality seeping in: definitions #1 & #2 deal with bodily pain, whereas #3 deals with that of the mind. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Rhapsody, who apparently fancies himself to be some kind of bug expert, or who at least enjoys pulling the legs off of them (the bugs, not the experts), raised the issue of consciousness:
Huh? What’s that? Consciousness? Who said living things had to be conscious to experience pain? Unless you plan on rewriting the dictionary, pain can be defined as “bodily suffering or distress.” There’s no mind or consciousness necessary here (unless, of course, it’s implied by terms like “suffering” and “distress,” but I’m afraid that topic deserves its own thread in GD). So how can we say that an insect doesn’t experience pain #1/2 when you rip its leg off?
My point is that pain can only be understood in cultural terms. This whole mind/body duality, after all, is a product of Western culture, and not everyone or everything lives within the embrace of that culture. There are Oriental cockroaches, too, you know. Big suckers, and they fly! Do they experience pain? I dunno, even though I’ve killed my fair share of them. I do know, however, that it would be a grave error to impose our own cultural concepts upon them when trying to ascertain how, or if, they experience pain.
“My point is that pain can only be understood in cultural terms. This whole mind/body duality, after all, is a product of Western culture, and not everyone or everything lives within the embrace of that culture. There are Oriental cockroaches, too, you know. Big suckers, and they fly! Do they experience pain? I dunno, even though I’ve killed my fair share of them. I do know, however, that it would be a grave error to impose our own cultural concepts upon them when trying to ascertain how, or if, they experience pain.”
Hank: So what are ya, Chinese or Japanese?
Neighbor: We are Laotian.
Hank: So are you Chinese or Japanese?
(King of the Hill)
Okay, so I had a difficult roach situation tonight and googled how to kill one humanely. The roach in question darted my Black Flag sprays for over 5 minutes and died what appeared to me to be a horrible death. I just stumbled upon your thread ten years after the fact, so… hello! Even ten years later, I still want to say one thing… everyone here presented very good arguments as to why roaches do not deserve our consideration in terms of extermination/associated pain. Whether or not roaches have the same nerve endings/ pain sensations as humans do… it’s something we really don’t know. Obviously, not one of us can shed our human skin and crawl inside to experience a day in the life of a roach. So I completely understand the original question asked by the author of this thread. And that question is… is there a better way? It is a great question and deserves to not be answered in the spirit of false bravado and the typical human sense of superiority, but… best to be answered in an intelligent way, considering scientific/clinical sensitivities but not desensitized to an exaggerated degree.
In closing - I just want to say that I am not an idiot… I work in a respectable, even scientific, field. Yet I am still concerned that I caused undue pain to another living being…and would like to find a better way.
I have no doubt roaches and most other insects feel pain (and fear). They can sense when their feet are making contact with the ground as they walk and run, they dart away from you in fear, they know how much pressure to apply with their jaws to tear a piece of leaf or other food to eat, and they will run from a heat source like crazy.
And they seem to take an entire day to die once they’ve flipped over onto their backs while being killed by sprayings done weeks or months earlier by long-lasting bug sprays.
I don’t like it and will kill any insect as quickly and humanely as possible by squishing it when I find one that needs killing.
It’s a longshot, considering how old this thread is, but I’d really like to hear from David Simmons whether this is a whoosh or not. If so, it’s one of the cleverest bits of sarcasm I’ve ever heard, but if not…
And for what it’s worth, I don’t believe insects have the neural capacity to suffer or feel pain the way we do. But I wish they did!
There are certain plants with leaves that curl up when touched. The plant is responding to a stimulus to move its leaves away from a threat. Is that fear?
And when a roach is on its back wriggling its legs and slowly dieing from nerve poisoning, is it in pain? Or is it’s nervous system so messed up from the poison that it believes it is moving, foraging, mating etc.
My point is that I know if I were being attacked or I were dieing like that it would be horrible agonizing situation. But I question whether an animal with incredibly simplified brain functions understands its situation enough to be distressed at all. It has some basic instinct to eat, move, avoid, rest and reproduce.
Think about it this way. We could program a small toy car with sensors that tell it to speed up and swerve when objects come near it. Is it afraid? We could also smash one of its wheels and damage it’s program so that it just spins around in a broken wheel circle till it’s battery dies. Is it in agony? We say no it isn’t because we know that the car experiences no emotions.
We can assume from observation that higher thinking animals experience stress, agony, joy etc but at what level of brain capability is a roach operating?
