Insects

M

Mickmeister

Registered Senior Member
Do you think there is such a thing as torture when it comes to insects? I don't think there is. They don't have the nerve receptors that we have to experience the same types of pain we do. They don't have emotions for panic and mental torture. I think there can be cruelty, but not torture.
 
While you could be correct, why even think about torturing anything at all? Animals in general don't bother humans so why disturb them?
 
Insects have nervous tissue and usually three neural ganglia, or very rudimentary brains. Not yet knowing exactly what the source in humans is for consciousness, I can't say that an insect doesn't have some rudimentary form of consciousness, and therefor a rudimentary form of suffering.

However, I'd agree that likely an individual insect's ability to suffer is a fraction of that of a mammals.
 
Mickmeister said:
They don't have the nerve receptors that we have to experience the same types of pain we do.
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No, that’s not quite correct. This can be a tricky topic to discuss because there are two concepts here: nociception and pain.

Nociception is a nervous system process that detects noxious stimuli and evokes a response in the organism. There are specific nociceptive receptors and neural pathways for all kinds of potentially damaging environmental stimuli (such as heat, cold, pH, radiation, physical force and tissue damage, noxious chemicals etc.) and the responses that are evoked can be at the genetic, biochemical, cellular or whole-animal level. So, there’s no doubt that insects do have the same sort of cell surface receptors and neural pathways for nociception that we do. They are present in every animal organism from nematode worms up to primates.

The confusion starts when people start to refer to nociceptive receptors as “pain receptors”. Pain is a sensation that is mediated through nopciception pathways. So pain appears to be an additional layer of neural functioning in animals with some level of cognition/sentience on top of the basic evolutionarily conserved nociceptive functioning.

Of course, there is great debate regarding the extent to which pain is experienced by various members of the animal kingdom.
 
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I don't think we'll ever be able to prove that anything doesn't feel pain (well, except for ourselves) So I try not to hurt things in general :)
 
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