I would be much more likely to at least agree that you might be right if not for the fact that most insects demonstrate a fear response and will flee from light, humans and predators, and most especially by the fact that they will run away frantically from a heat source or upon coming too close to a hot burner on a stove. For example, we used to unknowingly get June bugs under the stovetop and they would begin buzzing furiously trying get away once we turned on a burner. And occasionally a small flying insect would land on or near the stove and once they began to get close to an area that was hot they would immediately turn away.
As far as stress and emotion go, I got a surprising lesson in that once when I was painting the trim around my parents house. A few feet away from where I was working was a small wasp’s nest. The wasps were gone and I pulled it down and rusumed painting. I was working about six feet from it when the mother or father wasp returned to find the nest missing and was amazed to the see the degree to which the poor thing freaked out, frantically flying around back and forth and up and down all around the area trying to find its lost offspring and continued to do so for a good ten to twenty minutes. It didn’t seem to connect me with what had happened and in its stress didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me at all, and at the end of the day it was still hanging around that area of the house as if waiting to see if its nest would somehow show up. I was astounded.
I’m not saying insects feel pain or emotions as humans would, but I most definitely think they feel pain, stress and suffocation or nerve damage via bug spray. Consider also the fact that they have much less physicality relative to their brains and nervous systems than do humans, so the fact that those are both so relatively underdeveloped compared to us doesn’t mean that they aren’t sufficiently developed to allow for a certain amount of pain, fear and complexity of thought for their own physiology.
Many years ago, we moved into a very old house. I had sealed my moving boxes with duct tape. When I awoke in the morning, I found the duct tape covered with cockroaches. That night I put out 30 pieces of 6 inch duct tape through out the house. In the morning, I counted over 150 cockroaches stuck to the tape. Apparently, they were attracted to the glue on the tape, then couldn’t leave. I kept putting out duct tape, until there were no cockroaches. Very effective and no chemicals. After you gather them up, you can dispose of them as you see fit.
Neither of those anecdotes demonstrate fear or stress. What they do demonstrate is anthropomorphism.
A bug sensing potentially fatal heat and moving away from it doesn’t prove any emotion whatsoever. It doesn’t even prove emotions when people do it. I know the times that I have touched something as hot as a stove it wasn’t fear that caused me to jerk my hand back. It wasn’t even what I’d call pain. I didn’t even feel pain until seconds later. It was a purely reflexive response to the heat.
In the case of your wasp, you could say it was stressed if you mean that its environment has changed in such a way that it is apparently having difficulty adapting. But it’s a far leap from that to saying it was freaked out in a way that has even the slightest relationship to our experiences.
It’s probably pretty easy to demonstrate that insects feel some sort of pain (though even then it’s pretty easy to think of things you could do to a bug that will only cause it to pause for a moment or two but would invoke a crippling sensation for a human). A sensory input that causes an animal to move in response is one thing. That in no way supports a claim that it feels fear or most relevant to this thread, suffering.
