You might want to think twice the next time you pull out the fly spray. 快猫短视频s are increasingly willing to draw parallels between mammals and insects in areas that raise significant ethical questions about how we ought to treat them.
This year the pace of such research seems to be picking up. In May, scientists at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, published an article indicating that the main part of the nervous system in insects 鈥� the central ganglion 鈥� operates in a similar manner to a mammalian midbrain, and might also provide the capacity for the most basic form of consciousness, subjective experience ().
Now a group at Queen Mary University of London have described experiments on bumble bees that appear to show they exhibit 鈥減ositive emotion-like states鈥� ().
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The researchers cite other papers from the past five years indicating an increasing acceptance that invertebrates 鈥� which, including the insects, make up 97 per cent of animal species 鈥� may show basic forms of emotion.
That is not so surprising, given considerable evidence of intelligence in cephalopods (the group of invertebrates to which the octopus, squid and cuttlefish belong). But to grant that insects may have emotions opens 鈥� pardon the pun 鈥撀燼 whole new can of worms.
Saying bees have 鈥渆motion-like states鈥� does not necessarily mean that they feel happy or sad, or have other emotions. The Science paper says that the states found are not necessarily conscious 鈥� but they could be. Ethically, the presence or absence of consciousness 鈥� and hence the ability to suffer 鈥� is crucial.
State of bee-ing
Regulations for the protection of animals used in scientific research are typically limited to vertebrates because there is little doubt about their capacity for suffering. But in the UK the , and the European Union later included . If insects, or at least some of them, share the capacity for suffering, that would mean that they too should be covered. In sheer numbers, they are the most commonly used lab animals.
That would raise a question about the ethics of the latest research 鈥� for example, in one experiment 鈥渁versive stimuli鈥� are introduced; bees are temporarily trapped in a device intended to mimic the experience of being caught by a spider. Although they were able to struggle free, if the bees are capable of experiencing fear, then presumably this was distressing. In which case, was the finding that came from the experiment sufficiently important to justify inflicting that distress?
We must also wonder if bees are typical of insects. It is well-known that honey bees communicate the location of flowers, water or potential nest sites by means of an elaborate 鈥�waggle dance鈥�. Other insects do not, as far as we know, communicate in such complex ways. Bees also have more neurons than most other insects. So if bees are conscious, that would not show that all insects are.
We may hope that mosquitos, flies and ants are not conscious, so that we can continue to get rid of them without any concern that we are inflicting pain.
Even if insects are capable of suffering that does not mean that they have a right to life. What it would mean, however, is that we should reconsider the means we use to keep ourselves from getting bitten by them, or to prevent our food being contaminated by them, so as to minimise whatever pain we may be causing them.
