Animal Pain (2)

 1. The Boundary of Concern

Peter Singer, Practical Ethics p. 50

Your examples
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2. From mammals to fish to ... crabs and lobsters?

Definitions

1. Consciousness: all forms, in all cases it involves feeling, awareness, "what it's like"
2. Sentience: simple sensations, pain and pleasure

Birch’s views

1. Integration is evidence of pain
2. Precautionary principle (give the animal the benefit of the doubt)

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3. More dimensions of pain (in mammals at least)

Adam Shriver, "The Unpleasantness of Pain for Nonhuman Animals"

We need to understand animal pain because of the many ways we cause animals pain

1. Factory farming and slaughter
2. Animal labs
3. Animals in entertainment, hunting, fishing

Last time

1. Nociception
2. Pain 
3. Suffering

Sensory and affective pain

1. There are different dimensions of pain
• sensory: location, quality, intensity (finger burning mildly)
• affective: is it unpleasant? how unpleasant? (yes it's unpleasant)
2. You CAN have one without the other (your examples?)
• spicy food (capsaicin in chile peppers causes pain)
3. Sensory and affective pain can occur separately

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Evidence in animals

Conditioned place preference test

1. Normal mice 
• prefer dark side of chamber
• can be conditioned with pin pricks on the dark side to prefer the light side
2. Mice with ACC removed

• prefer the dark side of chamber
• pin pricks on right side don't condition them to prefer the light side 
• they still jump away from pin pricks

Escape experiment

1. Normal rats jump away from pricks and use escape route
2. Rats with ACC removed jump away from pricks but don't use the escape route

The rats without ACC are like rats on morphine

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Shriver's conclusions

1. Must study sensory and affective dimensions of pain separately to assess how bad it is for animals in farming, labs, etc.
2. Not entirely clear which dimension of pain is motivational
3. Both scientists and philosophers need to work on this

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4. How to apply these ideas for the benefit of animals?

• Article in New Scientist
• Shriver, "Knocking Out Pain in Livestock:  Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?" (2010)
• Shriver, "Genetically Modifying Livestock for Improved Welfare: A Path Forward" (2018)

From 2010 article above

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5. What about pleasure and other emotions?

1. Relevance of pain to ethics--FIRST stop harming
2. Relevance of pleasure to ethics--SECOND increase pleasure

Questions about pleasure 

1. Pleasure is like pain, so if there are specialized pain receptors are there also specialized pleasure receptors? (nociceptors vs. hedoceptors)
2. Could an animal feel pain but not pleasure?
3. Pain is a feeling, so can't be unconscious; is pleasure also a feeling, or can there be unconscious pleasure?

Inside the Animal Mind, part 2  12-18:50

"Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure: Reward in Humans and Animals"