Science: Can Animals Feel Pain?

[suchandra]

Science: Can Animals Feel Pain?

 

A prominent science magazine published today that the extent of animals' ability to feel pain was till now by far underestimated.

Although Vaishnavas usually have given up to comment the karmis callousness when it comes how to treat animals like cows - could be that gradually there's a revise in opinion and to understand by scientific research with latest technology, that animals feel pain very similiar like we humans do.

Once again Prabhupada's basic concepts being comprehensibly elaborated not by ISKCON but by others.

 

2.1.1 Pain

Animals feel pain in the same way as humans

http://www.ciwf.org.uk/publications/reports/Stop_Look_Listen_2006.pdf

 

The pain felt by humans is usually defined by physiologists as both a sensation and an emotion - an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. The pain sensation is transmitted by a part of the nervous system referred to as the ‘nociceptive system’. The perception of pain starts with ‘pain receptors’ called nociceptors, for example in the skin, which respond to painful stimuli such as pressure or a cut. The information is transmitted from the nociceptors to the brain stem and to the sensory cortex, and we experience conscious pain. At the same time, the brain produces opiates (natural pain-killing substances) which counteract (inhibit) the transmission of the pain signal. It is well known that, for humans, the subjective experience of pain also depends on the circumstances and context, for example its emotional significance, and on whether there are distractions from thinking about the pain.

 

Do animals feel pain in the same way that humans do? As far as vertebrates are concerned, most features of the physiology and anatomy involved in reception, transmission and central processing of information from ‘painful’ stimuli are found in all of them.

 

We must assume that conditions that humans find painful will also be painful to animals. As mentioned above, many laws that regulate the human use of animals also make this assumption. The Brambell Committee, asked by the UK government to report on animal welfare in farming, reported in 965 that ‘...all mammals may be presumed to have the same nervous apparatus which in humans mediates pain. Animals suffer pain in the same way as

humans.’

 

This applies also to birds and fish. Birds have nervous systems of similar complexity to mammals and fish have pain receptors and ‘similar physiological responses to painful stimulation to those shown by man’.

 

The Medway Committee in the UK ( 976-9) concluded from the nervous

system and anatomy of fish that they feel pain, and a review prepared for the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry concluded in 998 that

‘Fish show many physical responses to tactile and noxious stimuli which no doubt involve conscious perception’.

Increasing numbers of scientists also believe there is evidence that some invertebrate animals can feel pain.

[theist]

Of course they feel pain. That moron Descarte popularized the idea that they didn't and were in reality just machines that feigned painful reactions simply due to impersonal stimuli and nervous reactions.

 

His 'only animals have soul' still haunts the world today. Google on the guy and see how he tortured animals for fun.

[sreeram]

I totaly agree with theist. They also feel pain.

[Kulapavana]

not only they feel pain, which should be obvious to a 3rd grader, but they feel all human emotions as well

[sanatan]

 

not only they feel pain, which should be obvious to a 3rd grader, but they feel all human emotions as well

 

These are some of the lessons learned by children (and adults) when they have pets.

 

I'm thinking of an article in Back to Godhead, authored by a prominent female ISKCON devotee, that explored the question of pets and concluded that children should not be allowed to have them.

 

Another good example of dry theological analysis trumping common sense.

[suchandra]

 

These are some of the lessons learned by children (and adults) when they have pets.

 

I'm thinking of an article in Back to Godhead, authored by a prominent female ISKCON devotee, that explored the question of pets and concluded that children should not be allowed to have them.

 

Another good example of dry theological analysis trumping common sense.

This is surely right, stuff for children.

 

 

What is the distinction between the animal body and the human body? Biologically…. Here is our friend Mr. Ghosh. He knows very well. There is no difference biologically between human body…. Medical students in the biological department, they study from the frogs, from guinea pigs, the human constitution of the body. There is no difference.

Bhagavad-gītā 4.22

by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda

Bombay, April 11, 1974

 

 

Only problem, the way Vaishnavas presently preach such simple facts, it doesnt galvanize people - nothing changes. Things get even worse.

Instead we have to be confident that others will do.

Prabhupada knew how to reach peoples heart, that's what is presently missing.

[toronto]

Im sorry why shouldnt children have pets?

[suchandra]

 

Im sorry why shouldnt children have pets?

It is not about children shouldnt have pets - but presently followers of many different religions are uninformed and instructed by their leaders that animals have no soul. No soul means for them that the perception of pain within the animal's psyche is not actually considered as pain but as something like a soulless chemical reaction. A team of scientists say wait, there's more, we can proof that animals perceive pain like we do. Of course if they stick to the superstition that animals have no soul, the killing will go on. Actually Christians say something similiar about human beings who aren't baptized, they have no soul and after this life, everything is finished, no life after death. Therefore priests even won't allow heathens to be buried at a Christian graveyard - there is no immortal soul within heathens. Means, a heathen is just a bunch of chemicals, like they consider animals have no soul. But anyway, they say this is what Jesus taught.

 

 

Can animals feel pain?

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/pain/microsite/culture2.html

Lynne U Sneddon

Whether animals can feel pain has been a controversial issue for many years. Animals and humans share similar mechanisms of pain detection, have similar areas of the brain involved in processing pain and show similar pain behaviours, but it is notoriously difficult to assess how animals actually experience pain.

Pain can be considered to have two components: (1) physical hurt or discomfort caused by injury or disease; and (2) emotional suffering. Most people would agree that animals are capable of feeling pain according to the first definition. But it is less clear whether they also feel emotional pain.

Sensing damage

One of the functions of pain is to warn against damage and to act as an alarm system so that action can be taken to avoid or minimize injury. This usually takes the form of a withdrawal reflex. This sensory capacity is termed ‘nociception’, a simple detection and reflex response to damage, to distinguish it from pain.

Nociceptive nerves, which preferentially detect injury-causing stimuli, have been identified in a variety of animals, including invertebrates. Indeed, the leech and sea slug are classic model systems for studying nociception. However, it is believed that invertebrates are capable only of stimulus-response reactions and lack the necessary brain system that vertebrates have to process pain.

In vertebrates, nociceptive information is collated and augmented in the brain and signals are relayed down the nervous system to alter the intensity of pain. All vertebrates possess the primitive areas of the brain to process nociceptive information, namely the medulla, thalamus and limbic system.

However, one area of great importance for pain perception in humans is the cortex and its relative size decreases as we descend the evolutionary tree. For instance, in relative terms, the cortex gets smaller going from humans, through primates, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibia and finally to fish, which possess only a rudimentary cortex.

Behaviour

Other animals show reflex responses similar to our own. For example, when we accidentally touch a hot iron we respond almost immediately by retracting our hand. There is a lag period following this when no adverse sensations are felt but, if left untreated, the burn begins to throb and we alter our behaviour to guard the affected area.

Other animals respond to painful damage in a similar way. Their responses comprise several behavioural and physiological changes: they eat less food, their normal behaviour is disrupted, their social behaviour is suppressed and they may adopt unusual behaviour patterns (typically, highly repetitive or stereotyped behaviours, such as rocking to and fro), they may emit characteristic distress calls, and they experience respiratory and cardiovascular changes, as well as inflammation and release of stress hormones.

As these responses are complex and coordinated, it is likely that the brain is involved and they are more than just simple reflexes.

Although comparatively simple, fish have recently been shown to possess sensory neurons that are sensitive to damaging stimuli and are physiologically identical to human nociceptors. Fish show several responses to a painful event: they adopt guarding behaviours, become unresponsive to external stimuli and their respiration increases. These responses disappear when the fish are given morphine – evidence that they are, mechanistically at least, directly analogous to pain responses in more complex animals.

Emotional pain

Are animals capable of feeling emotional pain? Humans can certainly feel pain without physical damage – after the loss of a loved one, or the break-up of a relationship, for example. Some scientists suggest that only primates and humans can feel emotional pain, as they are the only animals that have a neocortex – the ‘thinking area’ of the cortex found only in mammals. However, research has provided evidence that monkeys, dogs, cats and birds can show signs of emotional pain and display behaviours associated with depression during painful experience, i.e. lack of motivation, lethargy, anorexia, unresponsiveness to other animals.

Although modern philosophers have debated this issue, we simply do not know whether animals experience emotional pain. In his essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, Thomas Nagel concluded that unless we can get inside the head of an animal and actually be it, we will never know exactly how that animal feels. An important issue in animal pain is empathy, and many arguments about what animals feel have can only be based on the human experience and, therefore, may be tainted with anthropomorphism.

Another argument against animals experiencing pain is the question of whether animals are conscious. James Rose, for example, has argued that no animals, except primates, are capable of feeling pain, as they are not conscious. In essence, consciousness is a sense of ‘I’, an awareness of how things affect me and how ‘I’ feel. Whether animals are conscious, or possess some degree of consciousness, has been endlessly debated, but consciousness is such a subjective experience it is hard to define and to assess. Fish can certainly learn complicated tasks, remember approximately 40 individuals, and measure their size relative to an opponent’s to decide whether to fight them. Therefore, at the very least they must have a sense of how big they are.

Higher vertebrates show even more significant signs of consciousness. Robert Hanna has suggested that animals may be conscious but that this is not as developed as human consciousness. Many argue, however, that consciousness is fundamentally dependent on language, something no other animal has yet been convincingly shown to possess. In contrast, Peter Singer, a bioethicist who has championed animal rights for many years, suggests that consciousness is not even the key issue: just because animals have smaller brains, or are ‘less conscious’ than humans, this does not mean that they are not capable of feeling pain. After all, says Singer, we do not assume that newborn infants, people suffering from neurodegenerative brain diseases or people with learning disabilities experience less pain than we would.

In practice, welfare scientists, who assess animal wellbeing in various contexts including intensive farming, try to be unbiased and objective when monitoring behavioural and physiological responses to potentially painful events. If an animal shows the same kind of adverse reactions as humans after a painful stimulus, it is assumed that the stimulus is also painful to the animal. Inevitably, however, all welfare science on pain is essentially a interpretation based on indirect measurements.

Weighing the evidence

In conclusion, it is currently impossible to prove whether animals are capable of emotional pain, but it is equally impossible to disprove it. The debate is largely a moral one, and comes down to personal perspectives.

Many hunters and anglers adopt the opinion that animals are physiologically dissimilar to us, are not conscious and so do not experience ‘suffering’ akin to human pain. The scientific evidence, however, shows that animals have the hard wiring to perceive and react to sensory pain and injury, and at least some of the brain structures that process pain in humans.

If one accepts that animals experience some kind of suffering when they are injured, then it is inevitable that a fox during a hunt, or a fish during angling, is going to have some form of pain inflicted upon it. The question then is, does the hunter’s or angler’s enjoyment outweigh the cost to the animal? There may be other factors to consider. If the fish is eaten after being caught, for example, do the nutritional benefits make a difference?

As we cannot get into the minds of animals, or meaningfully measure emotional pain in animals, perhaps we should accept that animal pain is different from human pain, and is something we will never be able to describe fully. Nevertheless, even if animal pain may be distinct from human pain, is that a reason to consider it less important either biologically or ethically?

Lynne U Sneddon is in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Liverpool.

[theist]

Actually in Genesis 1 Chapter one right in the begginning of the Bible where it says God created animals and man the same word is used to describe bothas living soul but the translators have translated animals into "living creatures" and man into living souls. They are both called living souls in the Bible.

 

I forgot the word, chaya something. Her Servant will know.

 

Christ never taught such nonsense as these present day Christians promote.

[theist]

A corrolaray discussion is 'do plants feel pain' and that has been proven already by Bose in the late 1800's. They are put into measureable distress even when someone has the INTENT to harm them.

 

The point being they have no human like nervous system. So the idea that we need a human style system before we can experience pain is fallacious. They start their theory on a false foundation.

[xenareborn]

I have been a vegetarian since birth and I deeply abhore such treatment of anyone - lunatics, animals ... anybody. But there has been a thought, a question that has always troubled me ...

How do we define 'hurting someone'?

If the killing of an animal causes pain, doesn't a tree being sawed/burnt down feel that too?

If I cut the ears of a lamb, he will bleed to dreadfully painful death... but may survive with a ghastly wound also.

Doesn't a plant feel the same pain , when we pluck its fruits, cut it's bark and use its roots?

[theist]

 

I have been a vegetarian since birth and I deeply abhore such treatment of anyone - lunatics, animals ... anybody. But there has been a thought, a question that has always troubled me ...

How do we define 'hurting someone'?

If the killing of an animal causes pain, doesn't a tree being sawed/burnt down feel that too?

If I cut the ears of a lamb, he will bleed to dreadfully painful death... but may survive with a ghastly wound also.

Doesn't a plant feel the same pain , when we pluck its fruits, cut it's bark and use its roots?

 

Not when a fruit is taken from a tree but certainly when it is cut does it register "pain".

 

How do we define 'hurting someone'?

 

You are bringing up a more advanced level of the practice of ahimsa with this question and it's implications are very great and probably should have it's own thread.

 

I am off to the Dr. but look forward to pusuing the question later. Thanks for raising it.

[suchandra]

 

I have been a vegetarian since birth and I deeply abhore such treatment of anyone - lunatics, animals ... anybody. But there has been a thought, a question that has always troubled me ...

How do we define 'hurting someone'?

If the killing of an animal causes pain, doesn't a tree being sawed/burnt down feel that too?

If I cut the ears of a lamb, he will bleed to dreadfully painful death... but may survive with a ghastly wound also.

Doesn't a plant feel the same pain , when we pluck its fruits, cut it's bark and use its roots?

 

Good points, seems like this world is made in such way that one living being lives from another living being.

"In the tree also, there is consciousness. It is now scientifically proved. When you cut tree or take its leaves, it feels, and that is recorded in the machine. This machine was discovered by Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, a great physicist in Calcutta. So everyone has got consciousness, there is no doubt about it."

 

Lecture

by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda

London, August 26, 1973

http://causelessmercy.com/t/t/730826LE.LON.htm?i=1973

[ThomasLB]

When I took Biology in college in the 1980s, we were taught that mammals could feel pain, but fish and birds could not.

 

But I have seen a bird with a broken wing, crying out in pain and fright, so I didn't believe it.

[suchandra]

 

When I took Biology in college in the 1980s, we were taught that mammals could feel pain, but fish and birds could not.

 

Because science doesn't know what is soul we ultimately have to look somewhere else for the right answers. In Bhagavad-gita Krishna says, yes, these are all living entities with a soul and consciousness but you human beings, you should eat what I tell you:

 

patram puspam phalam toyam

yo me bhaktya prayacchati

tad aham bhakty-upahrtam

asnami prayatatmanah

 

"If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit or water, I will accept it."

- The Bhagavad Gita (9.26)

source: http://www.bhaktiyogaclub.com/cooking.html

Purport by Srila Prabhupada

[...]Therefore, we should understand that He will not accept meat, fish and eggs. Vegetables, grains, fruits, milk and water are the proper foods for human beings and are prescribed by Lord Kṛṣṇa Himself. Whatever else we eat cannot be offered to Him, since He will not accept it. Thus we cannot be acting on the level of loving devotion if we offer such foods.In the Third Chapter, verse thirteen, Śrī Kṛṣṇa explains that only the remains of sacrifice are purified and fit for consumption by those who are seeking advancement in life and release from the clutches of the material entanglement. Those who do not make an offering of their food, He says in the same verse, are eating only sin. In other words, their every mouthful is simply deepening their involvement in the complexities of material nature. But preparing nice, simple vegetable dishes, offering them before the picture or Deity of Lord Kṛṣṇa and bowing down and praying for Him to accept such a humble offering enables one to advance steadily in life, to purify the body, and to create fine brain tissues which will lead to clear thinking. Above all, the offering should be made with an attitude of love.

 

 

 

 

 

Kṛṣṇa has no need of food, since He already possesses everything that be, yet He will accept the offering of one who desires to please Him in that way. The important element, in preparation, in serving and in offering, is to act with love for Kṛṣṇa.[...]

 

source: http://vedabase.net/bg/9/26/en

[Murali_Mohan_das]

Great discussion!

 

As has been pointed out, plants are very sensitive as well. Of course, the equipment used to detect plant sensitivity is very sensitive equipment. It is a safe assumption (but an assumption, nonetheless) that, not possessing a nervous system, plants do not feel pain in the same manner that humans and other animals do.

 

Still, unless we are offering bhoga to the Lord and He is accepting our offering, we are still accruing karma when we kill plants to eat them.

[Beggar]

 

 

Mallard

 

 

[Inedible]

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/strange-creature-immune-to-pain/20080129120109990001

 

"Strange Creature Immune to Pain"