Can moths feel pain?

This is probably a question that has been asked in some way or another, and raises a bunch of other questions like “what is pain?” and “how can we even tell?”, but I’m just a little guilty…
I was taking the trash out, and I didn’t see the moth I was about to step on as I walked out the door. It was a really pretty one too. Its guts were exposed, but it was still crawling around. I tried feeding it to my cat but she didn’t want it. So I put it out of its misery by, well, pounding its head in with my finger. Poor guy. I guess my question is ~ did it suffer?

It’s probably a waste of time to be so perturbed about something as insignificant as this, but I can’t not feel at least a little bad.

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I understand your point. I feel bad for killing anything that’s not in self defense in one form or another, or for food (and I still tend to feel bad, but those are just how things go unless you wanna die yourself). I once hit a jackrabbit with a car, and had to stop and check if it had died immediately. It was dying, but clearly conscious. Still, euthanising it by snapping its neck felt bad.

Issue of cognition and awareness is a complex one, and humans have had a poor record of extending the title to other species, especially not mammalian ones. I’ve noticed a few studies recently on social insects, like bees in one case, where their capacity for learning and understanding surprised the reasearchers. Just because we think something isn’t capable of something, does not make it true. It’s been shown over and over again.

Thus I’ve started to approach living things, with the thought of “just in case”. At this point it really starts going into psychology, ethics and wider philosophy, so I’ll drop this here. I know this isn’t an answer to your question per se, but it is an approach. In my opinion, yours was a good deed.

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I think that it would make sense for moths to feel pain, so they could figure out what was hurt and allow that part to rest, just like in humans.
I feel the same way about putting already suffering creatures out of their misery, and Charles Darwin felt the same way too, as he mentioned in his book The Voyage of the Beagle.

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IMO, it would make sense for them to.
A lot of people say not to humanise animals or to assign them human-like emotions. And regarding specifics that may be true, but I don’t think we can make this a general statement.

Having some sort of instinct of self-preservation is a very huge advantage. That means that those organisms that have evolved systems that make them avoid harmful situations will very likely outcompete competitors which don’t.
Neurons are a very old structure (the only animals that don’t have them are Sponges and Placozoans, afaik). So while I don’t want to go as far as say “everything with nerves feels pain”, I think it is fair to assume that pain is not an autapomorphy in humans, or even mammals.

I can’t say whether a moth experiences pain in the same way a human does, but I am fairly convinced, that physical injury is for the moth just as unpleasant an experience as it would be for us.

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We have had to learn, recently, that human babies feel pain.

As recently as the 1980s it was common practice for babies to be given neuromuscular blocks but no pain relief medication during surgery

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And a lot of them did or still do extend that to other humans who don’t believe in the Correct God, or who look or act or think different to their narrowly honed view of The Ideal.

I think it’s a mistake to assume any other creature, regardless of species, will think or feel like you do in any given situation, especially if they weren’t raised and educated in the same bubble that you were - but that’s a different mistake to the one of thinking that means they don’t think or feel or suffer or hurt or want or need or enjoy, or recognise those traits in other creatures, just as intensely as you might.

It’s never a waste of time to feel compassion. And that’s not a uniquely, or intrinsically, human trait either.

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Definitely.

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Some people still haven’t learned that human children feel pain.

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The evidence is accumulating to suggest that yes, insects can feel pain and suffer

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Might be just my autistic neurotype and some typical features of it, but I’ve been, as long as I can remember, sure that insects can feel pain. And also that they have more going on than being simple automatons. Still, some things that were strongly hinted by the tests described in the article were surprising.

I remember the news about the author’s tests about the learning, memory and reasoning capabilities of bumblebees. Hopefully others will take up the challenge as well.

Thanks for the article.

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I knew it! Would be pointless for them to have a nervous system if they couldn’t…

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Thanks for being compassionate. The kindest path is to assume yes. “An Immense World” by Ed Yong is a wonderful book on how other beings perceive their environment. It will have you thinking of many other ways to minimize the impact we have on others of all species. https://edyong.me/an-immense-world

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Was it the one where bees learned to unscrew a bottle cap and taught others?

It’s an interesting question, and one that we probably won’t be able to definitively answer. Most of the studies that purport to show that “X species feels pain” deal with behavioral responses to injury or chemical pathways analogous to human pain responses. Which is fascinating, but really doesn’t answer the question, IMO. If the question is “does species X respond in a way suggestive of a pain response” or “does species X have metabolic pathways that can be reasonably described as pain reception”, then the answer will be “yes” for pretty much every organism, even single-celled bacteria with no semblance of a nervous system. I don’t think anyone believes that bacteria can “feel” pain in a way that involves actual experience of negative emotions. Knowing what it feels like to be a moth, if anything, is simply not something we can know. Maybe they behave like little robots, receiving inputs and outputting behavior without any sapient experience. Maybe they “feel” at some rudimentary level analogous to how we do. I don’ claim to have the answer. But I’m very skeptical of the typical “scientific proofs” that are presented one way or the other when this question comes up.

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I remember of hearing about that one too. Now I’m referring to one, where the bumblebees had to figure out where on a colour field they need to put coloured wooden balls to get a treat, and after they mixed things a bit, they showed they understood the concept by working with colours that hadn’t been in the first round and could also do a team effort to hasten the process if multiple balls were present and also wait for help if it had come around earlier, and if I remember right, they also taught the new guy how the thing works.

The article @deboas links has much more, but also mentions the one I wrote about above. It was an interesting read. I have to appreciate that it is never expressly stated that “THIS IS SO”, but it is said that there are strong indications that this might be the case. I’ve seen so many times researchers jump the whole repeat phase and claim discoveries when there aren’t others who can confirm the result independently. Bad science, that.

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This is one of those interesting things, that seem to be very under researched even between humans. While there are certain ways and places in the body people tend to feel emotions, they are by no means always the same ones or in the same way. I usually at some point talk with people I’m more in contact with, about how they feel emotions and it’s been eye opening and mind broadening.

My point being: If there are variations in the ways of feeling (and also mentally processing) things inside the same species, which still seem to amount to the same general experiences, we probably have no clue how different species experience things, but general analogies do exist. Ofc there likely is also variation in the capacity for different feelings and experiences, and I’m by no means ruling out there being things humans don’t have an analogue to or humans not possessing some unique ones. I think this is also what you were saying? This paragraph might be more for myself to reassemble the idea.

Humans making themselves some universal special separate case and yardstick is one of those things that annoys me. I understand why it happens, does so in social structures as well, but being stuck in that one frame of reference is very hard for me to understand.

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Well that’s a data point I guess …

It would seem that laying out the case for why it is far more probable that any living creature with senses integrates them into actionable and memorable abstractions, not vastly different from how we do, on a spectrum from Joy to Suffering - and the history of why some find that so surprising, to the point of being an unthinkable and unmentionable heresy, with intolerable consequences should it be proven to them beyond doubt - is still an unmentionable heresy.

There are many cultures who since the dawn of time have considered this to be self-evident.

Modern science is still struggling to provide a definitive answer to the interesting question of whether or not we really have these attributes that some consider make us superior to Other Animals - and that’s fine, questioning everything is good. It’s just when the default assumption is that some animals are more equal than others that things start to look a bit, well, orwellian …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Notable_experiments

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And many individuals who considered it to be self-evident until they were trained not to.

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Yes, that was one of the points I’d made in my censored post. There is a circle for who this is dogma, despite there being even less proof that “X species does not feel pain” to pin that teaching to with any scientific rigour. It’s a status maintained by peer pressure, and the social consequences of the alternative being true, not by good science.

The research of Monica Gagliano on plants had some neuroscience folk up in arms with their knickers all a-twist - not because they could fault her methods or her results - but because it could not possibly be true since they had already declared that kind of behaviour to be strictly limited to things they considered had a brain and a nervous system.

If you’re not familiar with her work, here’s as good a place as any to get an idea of what to search for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Gagliano - but really, go read what’s in her published papers, not the pop-science explainers of them.

There’s a very long list of things which were historically unimaginable to, or dismissed by, science because it didn’t fit into some now discredited, and/or overly simplistic model of how things work. I don’t think it’s a matter of if this will be added to them, only one of when.

I grew up being taught, and mostly unquestioningly believing, the view that I’m now asking people to question. But nobody taught me to disbelieve that. It’s been the long slow accumulation of my own personal experiences watching, and taking the time to learn how to interact with, more and more species, in more and more complex ways, that makes more and more of what I have been taught look very, very, questionable.

It’s funny how we project the things we aren’t familiar with to be something the people before us must have understood even less about. People who never see the night sky (because even if they got up from their television at night, their brightly lit city would obscure the majority of it), sometimes believe wildly inaccurate things about what the people who lived before electric lighting understood was up there.

People who take language classes before traveling must have a hard time understanding the people who were excited by travel to unknown places with no knowledge of who they would meet or what language they might speak. Yeah, some of those people got killed in misunderstandings - but many more progressed from simple non-verbal signals and expressions of good will to complex understanding, communication and ongoing relationships. We somehow seem to forget it’s how all of us learned as children, and how we learned to communicate with our children.

So when you see something or someone writhing in apparent agony - are they somehow not in pain because they don’t know how to say Ouch in your language, or because you don’t think they are as smart as you? Or does it just really not matter whether their pain is exactly the same as your pain, when it’s clearly obvious they are showing signs of it.

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Zoology lost me when we did osmosis experiments on earthworms.
Dunk them in salt water. Increase the concentration till the earthworm dies, tying itself in knots. No pain?

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