Does A Fly Ache? Are Animals Conscious? New Research Is Changing Perspectives
Does an ant feel happy when it finds a food source? Or does a fly ache when its wings are pulled off? These may be questions one might ask themselves at times. Decades ago, scientists and researchers believed that invertebrates could not feel pain, let alone other emotions like fear or joy. However, recent studies and research have found that invertebrates are more than just reflex-driven beings.
This went unnoticed for a long time because many of them do not have “faces,” and their brains are organized very differently from humans. Dr. Andrew Crump at the Royal Veterinary College, who helped ensure that UK laws on animal sentience were amended to include large cephalopod mollusks and decapod crustaceans (octopuses, lobsters, crabs), explains that the nervous systems of all beings are hugely complex, and identifying consciousness and sentience is challenging.
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Crump and his colleagues, during their studies, found that bees were not simple stimulus-response robots. While bees can react to stimuli, they do so in sophisticated, context-dependent ways. Bees make decisions by learning color cues, choosing painful overheated sugars they previously avoided when non-heated options had low sugar concentrations. So, they made trade-offs by processing information in their brains and then modifying their behavior.
Experiments with bees, crabs, and octopuses show that some invertebrate animals can learn from painful experiences, have positive and negative emotion-like states, and might even experience a range of other emotions beyond pain and pleasure. However, not all scientists agree with this view, and many remain extremely skeptical.
Frans de Waal, a primatologist and animal behaviorist at Emory University, and Kristin Andrews, a philosopher at the University of York, published a paper in Science stating that invertebrates have emotions. The study provided evidence that invertebrates can learn and experience things beyond simple reflexes. If proven true, this could change the way we relate to and treat them, making them a part of our moral landscape.
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Experts are now building up the evidence, taking it further than our amateur human experiences can guess at. Yet, no matter how far science advances, we could still use the precautionary principle: one can assume that it is possible that invertebrates have feelings.
