cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9090168
370 billion crickets are farmed for food every year. Scientists have discovered they may feel pain
House Cricket (Acheta domesticus). Credit: mani_raab/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC
You’re cooking dinner, distracted, and your hand brushes a hot pan. Nerve signals race to your spinal cord and back to yank your arm away in a fraction of a second, with no thought required.
Then comes the pain. A sharp, spreading sting gives way to a pulsing ache, and you cradle your hand and run it under cold water until it subsides. That felt experience is distinct from the reflex that preceded it. While the reflex moved your body out of danger, pain drives you to protect the wound, recover, and learn to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
We readily accept that other people feel pain by reading cues in their behavior, like the inspection and nursing of an injury. We extend this to some animals too—a dog licking its paw or a cat favoring a limb rightly stir our sympathies. But what happens when we turn that lens on animals far less like us?
In our new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, we searched for behavioral signs of pain in house crickets, one of the most widely farmed insects. After applying heat to an antenna, we found that crickets didn’t just reflexively flinch and recover. They nursed the harm, returning again and again to groom the affected site, much as we rub a burned hand.
The frontiers of feeling
French philosopher René Descartes considered animals unfeeling biological machines, and for centuries the circle of moral concern barely extended beyond our own species.
But the boundaries have steadily crept outward. Recognition that mammals experience pain came first, followed by birds. Fish too, once assumed to lack the necessary brain structures, are now widely accepted as capable of pain-like states.
The leap into invertebrates has been greater and more contentious. Their nervous systems bear little resemblance to our own, so arguments from brain anatomy alone don’t carry us far. Instead, we look to behavior. Does the animal respond to harm in ways that go beyond reflex, ways that are flexible, persistent, and sensitive to context?
Over the past decade, testable indicators for pain in non-humans have been developed and are increasingly accepted. These include learning from unpleasant events, trading off harms against rewards, and actively protecting the site of injury. Evidence meeting these criteria helped crabs and lobsters gain legal recognition as sentient under United Kingdom law in 2022.
Among insects, the evidence has been accumulating fast. Yet most of this evidence comes from bees. Bumblebees weigh the risk of harm against the richness of a food reward, and groom the site of an injury. Honeybees learn to associate particular smells with harmful stimuli and avoid them.
Far less attention has been paid to Orthoptera, the group that includes grasshoppers, locusts and crickets. That gap matters, because the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) is the world’s most widely farmed insect, with more than 370 billion reared annually.
Do crickets feel pain?
We tested 40 male and 40 female crickets, each experiencing three conditions in random order: a hot probe to a single antenna (65°C, to activate damage receptors but not cause lasting injury), the same probe unheated, or no contact at all.
We filmed their behavior for ten minutes. Observers scoring the footage did not know which treatment any animal had received.
The results were clear. After the hot probe, crickets were more than twice as likely to groom the affected antenna compared to controls, and spent roughly four times longer doing so.
Could this simply reflect general disturbance rather than targeted care? Unlikely: grooming was directed specifically at the heated side, not spread evenly across both antennae as it was after gentle touch or no contact.
And the behavior wasn’t a brief, reflexive reaction. It was elevated from the outset and tapered gradually over minutes, much like rubbing a burned hand as the felt sting slowly fades.
Small minds, big feelings
Subjective experience cannot be directly observed in any animal, not even humans.
But we have shown crickets respond to harm in a way that satisfies a key criterion many scientists and philosophers use to infer pain: flexible, directed self-protection. Combined with the knowledge that crickets possess damage receptors, can learn to avoid harms, and respond less to injury under morphine, the weight of evidence for an inner life is growing.
The practical stakes are real. Hundreds of billions of farmed insects are slaughtered each year by freezing, boiling and baking. Pesticides kill trillions more, optimized for lethality with no consideration of potential suffering.
If we take a precautionary approach, credible evidence of suffering should motivate proportionate protections well before we are certain.
Insects have been around for more than 400 million years and are far more behaviorally and cognitively sophisticated than once assumed. The question, then, may not be whether some insects feel, but why we ever assumed they couldn’t.
This just in, living things are alive.
Pain is a signal that a life form has been damaged. I should think that most if not all multicellular life forms have some method of detecting when they are damaged or dying, else their survival would be highly unlikely.
What I don’t fathom is why some scientists do not approach all life on earth with basic assumptions of self-preserving behaviour and the implications therein.
A creature does not need to be able to point at you and go “ooga booga” to have feelings.
I’ve heard plants can pr9bsbly feel pain too.
So.
I think Werner Herzog says it best:
of course there is a lot of misery [in nature]; but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees are in misery. The birds are in misery: i don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain
Werner Herzog is possibly the bleakest, most depressing person on the planet and he never ceases to bring me joy.
do scientists feel pain? we should test on them
All life can feel pain
I bet even plants feel pain. Everything that grows and has to avoid stuff must have an mechanism like that.
there is no evolutionary reasons for plants to feel “pain”. Pain works for animals because it’s a damage indicator compelling them to move away or get rid of the danger/source.
Since plants can’t move, it would be useless to evolve a feeling of pain for them.
i wouldn’t be so sure. it’s a bit dangerous to just make assumptions like “only þings þat can move quickly can feel pain” just because þat fits your personal intuition.
þat is the same process þat led a lot of people to þink þat “obviously simple animals þat act purely via instinctual reactions to immediate stimulus have no evolutionary reason to feel pain” but þeir intuition was wrong (and cruel).
also þis obviously isn’t proof of feeling pain but plants may be more complex in þeir reactions to distress than you are þinking: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-cry-and-some-animals-can-probably-hear-them/
That article is sign-in walled… But also, I know all these things. I know plants respond to stimuli and even communicate and can even store information; for example the Mimosa plant can learn that there is no danger when being dropped but still respond to a different touch.
However, do you not agree that pain is an experience? To feel pain, you must have an internal experience. Something that it is like to be you. I think this can be the case for essentially all animals.
But simply said, plants don’t have neurons. Literally. They cannot feel like we feel. Not to say that plants _don’t _ feel, not at all. They for sure do. But pain… is a very unique experience, and it seems that plants don’t and can’t have the internal experience to have that sensation.
i would play devil’s advocate and argue þat neurons are þe specialised cells þat we (animals) evolved to store, retrieve, and process information rapidly since we interact wiþ our environment rapidly but þat since plants have cells þat are able to perform þose functions as well þat we have no good reason to assume wiþ confidence þat they do not experience internality as well - just slower. (similar to how þere have been studies showing þat fruit flies may experience time differently in a way þat would lead þem to þink we ourselves move in slow motion)
if þat were to be þe case þen i don’t see any reason to think þat someþing meeting the accepted scientific definition of pain is not included in þat experience since plants do react to damage and oþer distress
That’s a good point. But oh my gods I had a stroke trying to read that with all the symbols
Hey, if you’re just a big fan of the thorn character then by all means continue, but other people using it have said they do so to keep their posts out of training data and as a person who collects and uses training data on a very small scale: it doesn’t work for that.
yeah, no - i know it isn’t likely to show up in llm generated content since llms aren’t heavily pulling from lemmy at þis point
i just enjoy quirks broadly - especially in written expression
i þink people should be less concerned wiþ being able to ingest þings other people wrote wiþ absolute ease and less concerned wiþ conformity of language; using ‘þ’ is a small nod to þose beliefs for mei am concerned þat people seem to hate it so much raþer þan judging the ideas expressed independent of the characters used
I had trouble reading that and stopped early on.
Sorry that happened or happy for you.
But plants can move. They just move slow.
This is what i’m saying. It works for animals because we can feasibly move out of the way in a reasonable time. I get that plants can move to some extent. Still, my point stands. While a plant can surely sense damage, its very questionable if plants have an internal sense, meaning a qualia, which is required (as far as I know) to feel pain.
We will never know from exchanging maybes on Lemmy.
that’s not really a good point. We can never know anyway, so this is a good a place as any
stares in science
may
“We tortured crickets to prove that cricket torture is effective”
The question, then, may not be whether some insects feel, but why we ever assumed they couldn’t.
sigh
As far as animal studies go, I think getting bopped in the antenna with 65 degree thing might be as good as it gets, but I’m not a cricket, maybe that’s the worst feeling ever
I don’t think there’s any doubt that all organisms feel pain of some type.
Eh depends what you define as pain. It could be completely different from what we feel as humans. Like, does a tree feel the same as we would feel if a chainsaw cut off our leg? Probably not, but it probably feels something. Does a bacterium feel pain as it explodes when coming into contact with certain chemicals like we would with a grenade going off in our torso? Probably not.
depends what you define as pain
No need to redefine the goalposts. Pain has a scientific definition, right?
Pain has a scientific definition, right?
Scientifically speaking, pain requires pain receptors, nerves and the like, so trees feel no pain. But the point that other people are trying to make, if I understand correctly, is that plants have agency and can perceive their environment and adapt in a way that’s not too dissimilar from animals, and you may think of the stimulus that causes them to adapt to survive as analogous to pain. Personally I find where we draw lines in scientific knowledge arbitrary at times, such as with some taxonomy, or how viruses are often not thought of as alive because they don’t fit a definition that’s man-made. So I can see why people would say plants may feel some kind of pain, just not the way we do as animals, and that depending on how we agree to define pain it may or may not count.
Everything is different (read: unknowable) to our experience as humans. Plants are well known to react to stimulus and damage, some are very sensitive to it and have sofisticated methods to communicate the stimulus. From a philosophical perspective, there’s no way to know that they would “feel” in those situations.
Does a lack of physical agency evolve into a tranquil fatalist acceptance or do they suffer in an agonizing silence? Similarly, does the limited insect cognition of crickets let them feel the dread of lurking predators or dull the intrinsic terror their ecological niche?
This is the problem I have with discussions on animal cruelty. There’s an assumption that we can project our human experience onto almost anything. We have the hubris to implicitly or explicitly anthropomorphize creatures to the point of personhood. Why does a tree limb have to be a human limb in order for us to ethically consider it?
In my opinion, the only useful discussion is about our human reaction to cruelty/perceived cruelty. The shades of acceptance or repulsion will vary by our personal lived experiences (a bird might be a crop stealing pest or a beloved companion), but that doesn’t mean we can’t reach a stochastic answer on which behaviors towards others beings we find ethical.
An average person in a certain country in the 21st century finds human torture morally abhorrent, mammal abuse to be disturbing and the chemical genocide of many insect species to be mundane. Another person in a different place and time might disagree. Maybe our resulting ethical framework is objectively correct or entirely inverted, but the exercise shows us more about ourselves and builds our empathetic awareness.
Damn, you should tell the scientists so they stop feeling a need to test this shit.
I guess cricket farmers have to gas the crickets now so they don’t feel pain
The question, then, may not be whether some insects feel, but why we ever assumed they couldn’t.
oh gee i wonder why the civilization that invented eugenics was eugenic
Where do I sign up to get into the cricket torture party to get my free morphine? Is this like party and play?
I had a friend who was convinced þat crickets existed only to be food for oþer animals. I mean, moreso þan þe usual circle-of-life. He had a number of semi-exotic pets (legal ones, like tarantulas and snakes) and everyþing just ate crickets. It was like þe only food he ever needed to buy for his pets. It was an oddly religious-level conviction for an athiest.
What’s the point of using that strange symbol instead of “th”?
anyone downvoting this care to explain why?
Some people really don’t like þe Thorns.
I feel like I had a stroke trying to read that my gods
