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Do Insects Feel Pain?
- can16358p 2y agoI never intentionally harm a single insect... except flies and mosquitos. I hope they do feel the pain as they deserve it! Other than that I respect all of them.
- unshavedyak 2y agoFor me it's various forms of fruit flies. That they come into my office and just fly at my face or in my food randomly... well, i hope they suffer lol.
- Retr0id 2y agoI'm plagued by fruit flies but I can't say I've ever wished them harm. Which is weird because they're incredibly annoying. I think something has to be annoying me "on purpose" for that. And sure, I might swat at them or whatever, but that's just to make them go away.
- galleywest200 2y agoI used to never harm insects until I found ticks and mosquitos on my dog...So now I kill ticks and mosquitos. I like spiders though. I have had one living in my bathroom window for about six months now. It seems to be eating other spiders that try to crawl in based on the contents of its web. I consider this rent payment and allow it to stay.
- pygy_ 2y agoThe other "spiders" may be its molts. In any case, if it's growing, it's eating other bugs...
- c12 2y agoI have a similar spider story, for the past nine years a rather large spider (for the UK) had been living under the bookcase by my front door. I have left it alone, but do hoover up the graveyard of consumed insects every couple of months. I caught it a few months ago when I had new carpet laid, released it back to its spot once the bookcase was back in place :D
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago> I used to never harm insects Humans frequently kill insects unconsciously. Take a peek at a parking lot next to a river in warmer months, absolve yourself of guilt.
- jacknews 2y agoI remember having a spider outside my window with an orange body and green legs. It made a web all summer, and then laid a big egg, which hatched, and a hundred baby spiders came out and ate it.
- vharuck 2y agoI've had to relax my rule to never needlessly harm insects, and never do it just because it's the easiest way to get rid of them. For example, a single ant gets scooped up and thrown outside, but a line that found food is getting killed and their pheromone trail bleached.
- frutiger 2y agoI used to feel the same way but watching a flock of birds spend 30 minutes picking at every wriggling thing they see crawling in the dirt changed my perspective.
- nemo 2y agoI'm a bird watcher, I go out a fair amount so I've seen a lot of predation, not just of insects but other birds and mammals. I still don't want to do needless harm to any animals, even insects. I'll still take out roaches, fire ants, flour moths, and other invasive/pest insects, but I actually feel some remorse when I kill the moths and others since I believe they do suffer by my hand even if I don't have another choice I'd make.
- spants 2y agoand you still eat animals?
- TheNewsIsHere 2y agoThis feels like a comment made in bad faith.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nemo 2y agoNo, I'm a vegetarian, actually. I haven't eaten meat intentionally for around 35 years now.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI occasionally kill mosquitos, but I don't think they deserve it. They (and the diseases they carry) are just doing their part as ecosystems' hedge against monoculture.
- BrandoElFollito 2y agoI kill flies, mosquitoes, ticks and other insects that are dangerous to me. I borderline do not care about the ones that I do not like because they gross me out but I am not actively killing them. I protect many that I am not otherwise fond of, like spiders. I let them live their life in my apartment hoping that they will maybe pay me back by eating mosquitoes. I think I do not care about 99% of animals (but I will protect them when needed), hate 0.5% and like 0.5%
- ge96 2y agoMan I always feel bad having to kill a pest insect.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoBy definition, all life responds to stimulus, the most important of course being injurious phenomena.
- kakapo1988 2y agoI wonder if the invading aliens will wonder if we feel pain? However they decide, I just hope they make it quick.
- Clubber 2y agoI suspect most living creatures feel pain; it's a survival mechanism.
- sandworm101 2y agoPain only makes sense if an animal can learn. It is a teaching mechanism to modify future behavior. A very simple creature may act purely automatically, not even instinct but raw dna-programmed responses. Pain makes little sense there as there is no learning to be done. I doubt bacteria feel pain.
- anigbrowl 2y agoEvidence suggests bacteria can learn. I'm not suggesting you should feel bad about taking an antibiotic but cellular life is more complex than many people imagine. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1154456 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1154456
- Nasrudith 2y agoIt sounds weaselish but it depends on what you count as pain. If you count 'response to injury stimulus' then it just needs to be a productive action in response to the injury. Plants feel pain by that definition. Bizarrely plants can be anesthetized which freezes autonomic responses like rotating to face sunlight or opening of flowers. For an example of a useful injury response without learning: something like 'invest energy in upping the poison production if something bites my leaves' would be a useful response with no learning involved. Of course under that definition you could call alarms that go off when a window is busted a form of pain for the building. Which I suppose highlights just how loose our definitions really are. I'm no pain semantics expert but I expect rightfully or wrongly our definitions of pain are animal neurology centered.
- b112 2y agoPain also works to mitigate and prevent damage. It serves an immediate purpose, stop the pain! Something bad is happening!
- jtsnow 2y ago
- baxtr 2y agoI think a more relevant question is: do mosquitoes feel bad about killing humans? Billions of us, most of them children.
- colordrops 2y agoMosquitos are only one type of countless types of insects, most of which are harmless or even beneficial to humans. In any case if you are going to have such a war-like attitude, it's the humans that deserve to be destroyed by the animals, not the other way around. We are the ones fucking up the planet. And we kill almost 100 billion animals a year for food, and who knows how many others from other human activities.
- b112 2y agoHumans are animals, very successful ones. The only reason other animals are kept in check, is because they eat their food source until there's too little left to sustain them. Goats will eat everything bare, locusts destroy everything, beetles ruin forests, beavers dam rivers changing ecosystems so much, it can be seen from space. Every single lifeform on this planet expands, grows, multiplies without restraint. Animals don't csre one wit about conservation, or balance, or restraint. They never consider such things, ever, beyond filling their belly. You act as if other animals are somehow noble, yet it is only humans that take deep, strong thought and care about the environment.
- colordrops 2y agoNo, you misunderstand me. I do not act as if other animals are noble, I act as if humans are not special in comparison to other animals.
- b112 2y agoWell we agree then, but farm animals have run off cliffs, in a hysteria, to escape deer flies. I'm sure they'd want to exterminate such pests, all of them given a chance.
- anigbrowl 2y agoDescartes' ideas about automatism have had an unhealthy effect on the development of modern society.
- adamgordonbell 2y agohttp://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ma... Consider the lobster The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y agoI had tremendous difficulty navigating to read this. For whatever reason I could only visit page 1 and 10, so I wasn’t able to form any assessment of the article you posted. So it is without that background or knowing exactly where you stand that I offer: The lack of a commonly understood mechanism that can be used to communicate about pain with a lobster doesn’t mean that lobsters are incapable of feeling pain any more than it means that humans are incapable of feeling pain because we can’t talk to lobsters about it. This applies to any other creature. The lack of a common language doesn’t hold water as an argument that experiences can’t be shared. It may be that you and I agree with this, or not, but it is difficult without having read the article. Do you have a more accessible link by any chance?
- jgwil2 2y agoIt's a pretty well known essay--you should be able to find out in PDF format pretty easily by googling. It's very much on the non-lobster-eating side and touches on both physiological and philosophical arguments.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y agoI was unaware. Thank you!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aeternum 2y agoThis short video clip, no sound needed was enough to convince me the answer is very likely no. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Hq7zTb1J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Hq7zTb1J4
- nemo 2y agoLooks like the mantis was partially paralyzed by a hornet sting to me. The article noted that insects engage in nociception with examples, that specific mantis wasn't in that case, but that's certainly not a thing you can generalize from a single Youtube video.
- kjellsbells 2y agoSupposing that it was conclusively proven that they did not. Would it still be ethical to kill them? The Jain religion has quite a bit to say on this topic: https://voices.uchicago.edu/religionculture/2017/11/22/attending-to-insects https://voices.uchicago.edu/religionculture/2017/11/22/atten... Side note: the author also notes a very unusual consideration of electricity as consisting of a living force, that should therefore not be used needlessly.
- jojobas 2y agoIt would be still ethical if it was conclusively proven they did. There's no shortage of ethical theories ranging from Jainism to Nietzsche and they basically follow the laws of natural selection.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y agoAre you suggesting that the ultimate arbiter of whether something is ethical or not is whether it would be allowed by natural selection?
- jojobas 2y agoYes, natural selection judges ethical models just like it judges everything else.
- ofrzeta 2y agoWould it be inappropriate to say that the Jain religion is some kind of mental condition?
- throwudnfjrj 2y agoNo, they do not. Little boys have way more nerves and more neurons, but they do not feel any pain!
- mediamogul 2y agohttps://clip.cafe/family-guy-1999/coming-up-next-can-bees-think/ https://clip.cafe/family-guy-1999/coming-up-next-can-bees-th...
- josefritzishere 2y agohttps://archive.is/9udDF https://archive.is/9udDF
- Jun8 2y agoPeter Singer, mentioned in the article has a great (and influential) book published in 1979 called Practical Ethics, if you’re interested in this topic you should definitely check that out. If you’ve never listened to the Philosophy Bites podcast, here’s a relevant episode on the status of animals:https://philosophybites.libsyn.com/christine-korsgaard-on-the-status-of-animals https://philosophybites.libsyn.com/christine-korsgaard-on-th... Also here’s a thought: unnecessary harming of an entity is bad for its effect on you, ie one should refrain from killing an insect even if it did not feel pain. Same holds for a nice rock formation.
- jncfhnb 2y agoWhy is it bad for its effect on you?
- Jun8 2y agoAlong the lines of “A man is worked on by what he works on.” or “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster.” If you start destroying things for pleasure, your psyche may/probably will change. A parallel question I’ve seen: are training bonsais cruel?
- jncfhnb 2y agoI don’t think people kill insects for the joy of killing though
- sottol 2y agoMight still beget carelessness/lack of empathy or a feeling of being superior.
- hyperjeff 2y agoI did when I was a kid. Used to spend hours torturing insects. And I did think they probably felt pain in some way. I ended up well-adjusted, but kids are little psychopaths. These days I escort bugs out of the house if they are being bothersome, and otherwise just let them be their bad ol’ self.
- donatj 2y agoHonest question. If you remove religious and spiritual aspects and come at it from a place of pure reason, does it really matter? What is pain but a chemical signal something is wrong?
- brap 2y agoI don’t think wanting to avoid inflicting pain on others is religious/spiritual
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ultrarunner 2y agoIs it merely preferential, then?
- brap 2y agoIt’s a preference that’s somewhat hardcoded in our brain, kind of like preferring to seek friendships, achieve goals, etc.
- ultrarunner 2y agoIn that case, I don't think there's any reason to believe that it's objectively good. Some preferences are met, some are not, but there isn't any requirement that they are either way. In that sense, I suppose it is indeed all meaningless chemical signaling. (for what it's worth, I do not accept this view as truth, in part because if it is "true" there isn't any real sense of truth for it to be of significance)
- dwaltrip 2y agoI’m not sure I’m understanding. You’re saying it’s fine if someone punches you in the face?
- 2y ago
- satisfice 2y agoWhat stops us from abusing each other as humans is not mainly compassion, but rather the threat of reciprocal violence, and our interdependence on each other for the basics of life. In other words: killing is bad for you and it’s bad for business. Causing pain follows roughly the same logic. Morality surrounding suffering depends on personal feeling and has no basis in practical life except inasmuch as one might calculate that an interest group will act on such a feeling. For instance: I can be recruited to save a dog from suffering, but not to save a spider. It’s not reason that drives me here, but feelings alone. My rational parts understand that my existence is predicated on non-rational equipment. I am not ashamed of this, and neither should you be. No one lives except by occupying space and resources, and refraining from actions (such as killing yourself to feed hungry worms) that would otherwise create pleasure and ease suffering of some other creature. Life under finite resources is inherently tragic. The coming of oxygen to the atmosphere of Earth was a disaster for anerobic bacteria! We’re not going to repeal oxygen! As I age, I find that I want to avoid gratuitous harm of animals— even pests. I am less cruel than I used to be. But I have no justification for changing, and have no argument to make about it.
- skepticATX 2y agoAll life is due respect and consideration. Of course, a human life gets the maximum consideration, and an insect life much less. Plant life even less, but some. Capability to feel pain doesn’t have anything to do with this, in my mind.
- nis0s 2y agoI think ultimately the goal of such questions is assessing qualia for different beings, but I think sentience is a low bar for this assessment. The underlying assumption is that if something feels pain, then it must have an inner mental state, or consciousness. But many organisms demonstrate behaviors which are reactive to stimuli, and can be called sentient, but those organisms don’t necessarily possess cognitive abilities which demonstrate self-consciousness. I disagree that sentience should ever have been included as determinant of consciousness, and only demonstrating self-consciousness defines an inner mental state that is more than just a sum of chemical reactivity. So, I don’t think insects have any awareness other than impulses driven by genetic programming. That said, insects of all types, including mosquitoes, sustain ecosystems through their existence, which are vital for food chains and so on. I don’t think insect control should be put off necessarily because insects feel pain (because they don’t feel pain in the way that a self-aware animal does), but because overdoing insect control can ruin ecosystems which people need to live.
- joeyo 2y agoPeter Godfrey-Smith discusses this topic at length in his recent-ish book Metazoa and uses observations of insects and other invertebrates to argue, compellingly in my opinion, that sentience and cognitive abilities are not intrinsically linked, but rather depend on the specific organism's evolutionary/reproductive strategies. Most insects do not exhibit the classic signs of pain responses (the new findings discussed in this New Yorker article, notwithstanding). For example insects generally don't groom or guard an amputated limb. This puzzling (lack of) response can be explained as being aligned with their reproductive strategy: they reach breeding age quickly and die soon after. Thus, it's better not to waste energy avoiding limb loss for a future that won't happen. Despite this lack of sentience, insects can be quite intelligent and learn complex cues and behaviors. Other invertebrates that look superficially like insects, prawns for example, have quite different life cycles and lifespans and often do exhibit signs of pain / sentience. Basically pain/sentience emerge when there is a reason for the organism to protect the body from damage, and does not evolve (or is subsequently lost!) when there are more important short term goals. One wonders, for example, whether salmon experience pain when they fling their bodies up rivers, over and onto rocks, damaging them horribly in the process: all for purposes of spawning.
- Earw0rm 2y agoOn this topic, highly recommend this book, which provides a rather different perspective: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50403455-metazoa https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50403455-metazoa Breaking it down - what we think of as pain perception is not one thing but several, as you'd expect for one of the major functions in a ninety-giganeuron brain. There's something not much more than a low-level reflex response - "Ouch" - and most animals have that. There's wound-grooming behaviour, which is mostly linked to capacity to heal, and shows up in perception as the longer-lasting (minutes to days/weeks) pain from an injury. A lot of animals with exoskeletons have very limited healing capacity, so there's no point in attempting to heal. This is thought to be why, for example, a severely and probably fatally damaged ant will just keep on trucking, whereas even the simplest mammals and reptiles will attempt to rest and heal. Then there's awareness of mortality. Simply, an animal that doesn't know it's alive can't connect pain to the concept of death. To what extent this exists across the animal kingdom is one of the great unknowns. And then finally there's placing a value on one's life (and so negative value on harm to it), and the way in which we humans understand that is intimately bound up with concepts like love, grief, friendship, family and so on - these likely exist for animals that care for their young. Those are traits mostly limited to higher vertebrates, and it's not entirely clear to what extent birds and mammals have a common ancestor with that capability (therefore some commonality in "experience") or whether that's convergent evolution. It's pretty clear that it exists across all mammals, but has independently developed to much higher levels in the most intelligent ones (cetaceans, elephants, apes), despite these groups being very far apart on the mammal tree of life, having diverged almost at the origin of placental mammals (which makes more sense when you consider what a placenta is for). So what the pain experience is "like" for a hive-society animal like Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants), where caste roles are biologically determined, is impossible to say, if indeed there is any experience there. The skin (or exoskeleton) they have in the game is so different to ours that it's hard to reason about it.
- Earw0rm 2y agoJust to add to this. Pain is further associated with the fear-terror-excitement response axis, which can be thought of as the ability to anticipate and remember pain/loss and ramp metabolism in response. Fight-or-flight basically. This is more developed in mammals and birds, warm-blooded animals can turn their metabolism up and down at will as part of their survival strategy. All vertebrates have it to some extent, but e.g. quadrupeds can run faster, most birds can only choose to fly or not at all. My take-away is that we should be more concerned about how we treat animals that are very clearly capable of a wide range of emotions, and which humanity currently treats extremely poorly - pigs and cattle especially.