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Comment by devinj | Hacker News Reader

Wait. You mean people thought they didn't?

I'm not at all experienced in the realm of animal activism as it relates to lobsters and crabs, but did people really think that animals didn't feel something akin to pain if you ripped their limbs off? Pain is a vital mechanism/motivation for survival and thus evolutionarily advantageous. Maybe some complex animals don't have it, but they'd have to be pretty weird (although I admit, lobsters and crabs would be in the right category-- it's not going to be a vertebrate that feels no pain-- they aren't particularly unique in terms of how they grow and die).

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You don't need pain if you can't learn from it. If your environment is stable enough that you can operate entirely by innate reflex, there's no reason to waste genetic selection pressure on crafting sensations for the benefit of some passive, ineffectual observer inside the lobster. Or the observer itself, for that matter. Its almost certainly true that lobsters feel pain (response to analgesics is damn convincing), but it isn't obviously true without evidence like this study.

> It may well be true that lobsters feel pain, but it isn't obviously true without evidence like this.

Then at best the evidence is inconclusive. This is usually an issue that is trotted out as 'fact' a lot when it comes to debates about boiling lobsters/crabs alive for food. So really the 'general knowledge' of this should be:

  We don't know whether or not lobsters and crabs feel pain.

and not:

  We know for sure that crabs and lobsters don't feel pain,
  because if they did, then I would feel bad about going
  to Red Lobster for dinner.

> response to analgesics is damn convincing

It's not. It just means you blocked the negative stimulus, so that innate reflex you mentioned does not trigger.

It doesn't necessarily mean they feel pain.

Personally I don't think this question is possible to answer, so I behave as if all animals feel pain and I avoid inflicting it, except when I have no alternative. And when I have no alternative I try to minimize the duration and/or severity (giving priority to minimizing duration over severity).

You don't need pain if you can't learn from it.

Whaaaat? You need pain to run away from the source of it, and to warn your relatives by screaming.

> Wait. You mean people thought they didn't?

If you rip the leg off an ant it keeps going as if nothing happened. Or if you cut an earthworm in half it behaves normally. So clearly not all animals feel pain.

The question becomes which ones do, and which don't. You can't ask them, so at best you watch their behavior and look for changes.

The trouble comes in when you try to distinguish between pain and suffering. Pain prompts an animal to change behavior. A worm being shocked will move away - but does that mean it suffers? Or just that it avoids the negative stimulus?

I can't give you the answer, but at least I can help you understand the question.

Don't know about the earthworm, but for the ant it's like this:

The ant itself might not feel pain but the ant colony as a whole does feel "pain", the reason for this is that an ant is the equivalent to a human cell. It doesn't feel pain by itself.

To verify this, just find a big ant colony (with hundreds of ants above ground, doing their stuff) and then step on some ants and you will see them completely freak and try to find the attacker so that it doesn't cause any more "pain" the colony.

We're talking about the neurological pain, the pain that you feel when you pinch yourself. An ant colony cannot feel this, unless it is somehow conscious.

Define... "conscious".

> Or if you cut an earthworm in half it behaves normally.

It does not. It certainly does act like it feels pain. And in a few minutes it dies.

I'm not sure you've ever seen an injured worm.

As for ants:perhaps so. The thing is, ants are really different and interesting. As I said, perhaps some animals don't feel pain, but they'd have to be pretty weird. I would suppose ants qualify, being essentially borg, which is pretty out there. Lobsters, not so much.

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