The Pain of Animals

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY HAS TAKEN US BEYOND THE NORMAL BARRIERS of life and death and thereby created unprecedented choices in human lives. Until recently, we have taken for granted our right to use other species in any way we see fit. Food, clothing, muscle power have been a few of the benefits we’ve derived from this exploitation. This tradition has continued into scientific research, where animals are studied and “sacrificed” for human benefit. Now serious questions are being asked about our right to do this

Modern biological research is based on a shared evolutionary history of organisms that enables us to extrapolate from one organism to another. Thus, most fundamental concepts in heredity were first shown in fruit flies, molecular genetics began using bacteria and viruses, and much of physiology and psychology has been based on studies in mice and rats. But today, as extinction rates have multiplied as a result of human activity, we have begun to ask what right we have to use all other animate forms simply to increase human knowledge or for profit or entertainment. Underlying the “animal rights” movement is the troubling question of where we fit in the rest of the natural world.

When I was young, one of my prized possessions was a BB gun. Dad taught me how to use it safely, and I spent many hours wandering through the woods in search of prey. It’s not easy to get close enough to a wild animal to kill it with a BB gun, but I did hit a few pigeons and starlings. I ate everything I shot. Then as a teenager, I graduated to a .22 rifle, and with it I killed rabbits and even shot a pheasant once.

One year I saw an ad for a metal slingshot in a comic book. I ordered it, and when it arrived, I practiced for weeks shooting marbles at a target. I got to be a pretty good shot and decided to go after something live. Off I went to the woods and soon spotted a squirrel minding its own business doing whatever squirrels do. I gave chase and began peppering marbles at it until finally it jumped onto a tree, ran to the top, and found itself trapped. I kept blasting away and grazed it a couple of times, so it was only a matter of time before I would knock it down. Suddenly, the squirrel began to cry—a piercing shriek of terror and anguish. That animal’s wail shook me to the core and I was overwhelmed with horror and shame at what I was doing—for no other reason than conceit about my prowess with a slingshot, I was going to kill another being. I threw away the slingshot and my guns and have never hunted again.

All my life, I have been an avid fisherman. Fish have always been the main source of protein in my family, and I have never considered fishing a sport. But there is no denying that it is exciting to reel in a struggling fish. We call it “playing” the fish, as if the wild animal’s desperate struggle for survival is some kind of game.

I did “pleasure-fish” once while filming for a television report on the science of fly-fishing. We fished a famous trout stream in the Catskill Mountains of New York State, where all fish had to be caught and released. The fish I caught had mouths gouged and pocked by previous encounters with hooks. I found no pleasure in it, because to me fish are to be caught for consumption. Today, I continue to fish for food, but I do so with a profound awareness that I am a predator of animals possessing well-developed nervous systems that detect pain. Fishing and hunting have forced me to confront the way we exploit other animals.

I studied the genetics of fruit flies for twenty-five years and during that time probably raised and killed tens of millions of them without a thought. In the early seventies, my lab discovered a series of mutations affecting the behavior of flies, and this find led us into an investigation of nerves and muscles. I applied for and received research funds to study behavior in flies on the basis of the similarity of their neuromuscular systems to ours. In fact, psychologists and neurobiologists analyze behavior, physiology, and neuroanatomy of guinea pigs, rats, mice, and other animals as models for human behavior. So our nervous systems must closely resemble those of other mammals.

These personal anecdotes raise uncomfortable questions. What gives us the right to exploit other living organisms as we see fit? How do we know that these other creatures don’t feel pain or anguish just as we do? Perhaps there’s no problem with fruit flies, but where do we draw the line? I used to rationalize angling because fish are cold-blooded, as if warm-bloodedness indicates some kind of demarcation of brain development or greater sensitivity to pain. But anyone who has watched a fish’s frantic fight to escape knows that it exhibits all the manifestations of pain and fear.

I’ve been thinking about these questions again after spending a weekend in the Queen Charlotte Islands watching gray whales close up. The majesty and freedom of these magnificent mammals contrasts strikingly with the appearance of whales imprisoned in aquariums. Currently, the Vancouver Public Aquarium is building a bigger pool for some of its whales. In a radio interview, an aquarium representative was asked whether even the biggest pool can be adequate for animals that normally have the entire ocean to rove. Part of her answer was that if we watched porpoises in the pool, we’d see that “they are quite happy.”

That woman was projecting human perceptions and emotions onto the porpoises. Our ability to empathize with other people and living things is one of our endearing qualities. Just watch someone with a beloved pet, an avid gardener with plants, or for that matter, even an owner of a new car, and you will see how readily we can personalize and identify with another living organism or an object. But are we justified in our inferences about captive animals in their cages?

Most wild animals have evolved with a built-in need to move freely over vast distances, fly in the air, or swim through the ocean. Can a wild animal imprisoned in a small cage or pool, removed from its habitat and forced to conform to the impositions of our demands, ever be considered “happy”?

Animal rights activists are questioning our right to exploit animals, especially in scientific research. Scientists are understandably defensive, especially after labs have been broken into, experiments ruined, and animals “liberated.” But just as I have had to question my hunting and fishing, scientists cannot avoid confronting the issues raised, especially in relation to our closest relatives, the primates.

People love to watch monkeys in a circus or zoo, and a great deal of the amusement comes from the recognition of ourselves in them. But our relationship with them is closer than just superficial similarities. When doctors at Loma Linda Hospital in California implanted the heart of a baboon into the chest of Baby Fae, they were exploiting our close biological relationship.

Any reports about experimentation with familiar mammals like cats and dogs are sure to raise alarm among the lay public. But the use of primates is most controversial. In September 1987, at the Wildlife Film Festival in Bath, England, I watched a film shot on December 7, 1986, by a group of animal liberationists who had broken into SEMA, a biomedical research facility in Maryland. It was such a horrifying document that many in the audience rushed out after a few minutes. There were many scenes that I could not watch. As the intruders entered the facility, the camera followed to peer past cage doors, opened to reveal the animals inside. I am not ashamed to admit that I wept as baby monkeys deprived of any contact with other animals seized the fingers of their liberators and clung to them as our babies would to us. Older animals cowered in their tiny prisons, shaking from fear at the sudden appearance of people.

The famous chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall also screened the same film and as a result asked for permission to visit the SEMA facility. This is what she saw:

Room after room was lined with small, bare cages, stacked one above the other, in which monkeys circled round and round and chimpanzees sat huddled, far gone in depression and despair.

Young chimpanzees, three or four years old, were crammed, two together into tiny cages measuring 57 cm by 57 cm [22 inches by 22 inches] and only 61 cm [2 feet] high. They could hardly turn around. Not yet part of any experiment, they had been confined in these cages for more than three months.

The chimps had each other for comfort, but they would not remain together for long. Once they are infected, probably with hepatitis, they will be separated and placed in another cage. And there they will remain, living in conditions of severe sensory deprivation, for the next several years. During that time they will become insane.

Goodall’s horror sprang from an intimate knowledge of chimpanzees in their native habitat. There, she has learned, chimps are nothing like the captive animals that we know. In the wild, they are highly social, requiring constant interaction and physical contact. They travel long distances, and they rest in soft beds they make in the trees. Laboratory cages do not provide the conditions needed to fulfill the needs of these social, emotional, and highly intelligent animals.

Ian Redmond gives us a way to understand the horror of what lab conditions do to chimps:

Imagine locking a two- or three-year-old child in a metal box the size of an isolette—solid walls, floor and ceiling, and a glass door that clamps shut, blotting out most external sounds—and then leaving him or her for months, the only contact, apart from feeding, being when the door swings open and masked figures reach in and take samples of blood or tissue before shoving him back and clamping the door shut again. Over the past 10 years, 94 young chimps at SEMA have endured this procedure.

Chimpanzees, along with the gorilla, are our closest relatives, sharing 99 percent of our genes. And it’s that biological proximity that makes them so useful for research—we can try out experiments, study infections, and test vaccines on them as models for people. And although there are only about forty thousand chimps left in the wild, compared with millions a few decades ago, the scientific demand for more has increased with the discovery of AIDS.

No chimpanzee has ever contracted AIDS, but the virus grows in them, so scientists argue that chimps will be invaluable for testing vaccines. On February 19, 1988, the National Institute of Health in the U.S. cosponsored a meeting to discuss the use of chimpanzees in research. Dr. Maurice Hilleman, director of the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research, reported:

We need more chimps.… The chimpanzee is certainly a threatened species and there have been bans on importing the animal into the United States and into other countries, even though … the chimpanzee is considered to be an agricultural pest in many parts of the world where it exists. And secondly, it’s being destroyed by virtue of environmental encroachment—that is, destroying the natural habitat. So these chimpanzees are being eliminated by virtue of their being an agricultural pest and by the fact that their habitat is being destroyed. So why not rescue them? The number of chimpanzees for AIDS research in the United States [is] somewhere in the hundreds and certainly, we need thousands.

Our capacity to rationalize our behavior and needs is remarkable. Chimpanzees have occupied their niche over tens of millennia of biological evolution. We are newcomers who have encroached on their territory, yet by defining them as pests we render them expendable. As Redmond says, “The fact that the chimpanzee is our nearest zoological relative makes it perhaps the unluckiest animal on earth, because what the kinship has come to mean is that we feel free to do most of the things to a chimp that we mercifully refrain from doing to each other.”

And so the impending epidemic of AIDS confronts us not only with our inhumanity to each other but to other species.

Update

It has long been argued (usually by sport fishers) that fish do not feel pain. If the hook in the mouth of a fish caused pain, it is reasoned, the animal would not fight against the pressure but would come toward the fisher to reduce the pain. But any fisher knows that the most exciting part of “playing” a fish is when the animal tugs, thrashes, and leaps frantically to escape, behavior that sure suggests fear and discomfort.

A more powerful argument that animals don’t feel pain is the suggestion that pain is a purely conscious experience, with heavy input from sensory and emotional components. By this reasoning, for a fish to feel pain, it must have consciousness. But, it is said, the brain of a fish is too primitive for such attributes.

On April 30, 2003, Dr. Lynne Sneddon of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. In the article, she reported injecting bee venom or acetic acid into the lips of rainbow trout, the controls being fish injected with saline or simply handled manually. The venom- or acidtreated fish responded with displays of “profound behavioural and physiological changes” over a period of time. They took three times as long as the controls to begin feeding again and immediately after injection would rub their lips in gravel or against the walls of the tank. The fish displayed a “ ‘rocking’ motion seen in stressed higher vertebrates like mammals.”

Sneddon’s group also found receptors in the head called polymodal nociceptors that are known to respond to stimuli that damage tissues. They conclude: “Our research suggests noxious stimulation in the rainbow trout has adverse behavioural and physiological effects. This fulfills the criteria for animal pain.” Animal rights activists hailed the work, while sport fishers were nearly unanimously reluctant to accept it v1