Document type: article published in Scientific American
Author: Lars Chittka
Preview: Insects have surprisingly rich inner lives-a revelation that has wide-ranging ethical implications.
Researchers have [...] shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects-and maybe all of them-are sentient
These discoveries raise fascinating questions about the origins of complex cognition. They also have far-reaching ethical implications for how we should treat insects in the laboratory and in the wild.
Signs of Intelligence
The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons-unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds. [...] Given the substantial work on the sophistication of insect cognition, it might seem surprising that it took scientists so long to ask whether, if some insects are that smart, perhaps they could also be sentient, capable of feeling. [...] Other research hinted that insects might also have positive states of mind. But these suggestive hints of negative and positive mind states still fell short of what was needed to demonstrate that insects are sentient.
Pleasure and Pain
[...] Other work suggests that bees can experience not only optimism but also joy. [...] These experiments are not merely cute-they provide further evidence of positive emotionlike states in bees.
All this research raised the more uncomfortable question of whether bees might also be capable of experiencing pain. Investigating this issue experimentally presents researchers with a moral dilemma: if results are positive, the research might lead to improved welfare of trillions of wild and managed insects. But it would also involve potential suffering for those animals that are tested to obtain the evidence. [...]Bees and other insects also form long-term memories about the conditions under which they were hurt. And they have specialized sensors that detect tissue damage and are connected to brain regions that also process and store other sensory stimuli. These creatures have the necessary neural equipment to modulate pain experiences by top-down control. That is, they are not constrained by simple reflex loops when responding to noxious stimuli but display the flexibility to modify their responses according to current circumstances, in the same way as we can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building. [...]If at least some insects are sentient and can feel pain, as appears to be the case, what are the implications of that revelation? [...] The insight that many conventional livestock animals are probably sentient hasn't stopped humans from killing them. But it has resulted in an awareness (and legislation in many countries) that this should be done in such a way as to minimize distress and pain. [...]To live, to eat, we almost inevitably kill other living things, even if our labor division means that you personally don't do the killing. But to the extent that the affected creatures are probably sentient, we have a moral obligation to minimize their suffering-whether in research labs, on feed-and-food farms, or in agricultural settings.
The fact that to date there is no smoking-gun type of proof for any animal's sentience does not mean we're off the hook. On the contrary, the reasonably strong psychological, pharmacological, neurobiological and hormonal indicators of sentience that we now have for many animals, including some insects, mean that acquiring evidence in the opposite direction is in order. We should demand reasonably strong evidence of the absence of sentience before subjecting them to interventions that have the potential to cause intense distress.
