A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Ever wondered if insects feel pain? We interact with them every day, and they're nearly 40% of all living species on Earth. Now new research explores the possibility that insects feel the subjective experience of pain. It's known as being sentient. Science journalist Shayla Love wrote about it in The New Yorker about what it might mean for humans if bugs can indeed feel pain.
SHAYLA LOVE, BYLINE: This is very difficult to prove, right? Even in humans, to evaluate pain is really, really tricky. We have all of these pain scales where we try to rate from 1 to 10 to describe what we're feeling. And so a lot of the people studying insect pain are just doing studies to not prove that insects feel pain, but question the reasons why we think they don't. There was a really great study done by Matilda Gibbons, where she challenged bees to drink from one of two feeders, and one of them was heated, and the other one was room temperature.
But if she increased the level of sugar in the heated feeder, she would see that the bees, only when the sugar was increased, would endure the heat in order to drink the sweeter liquid. It's really about showing that they're just not robots.
MARTÍNEZ: Now, if we do, indeed, discover that insects are sentient, I mean, what should humans do about it? Because, I mean, I'll admit, I shoo away insects all the time. And if I see, say, a black widow spider, I don't think about shooing them as much as I think about squishing them. So how do we deal with it if insects are sentient, if that, indeed, becomes the case?
LOVE: Right. This is the normative question. Like, let's say that we can never prove it for sure, but we've raised this plausible reasoning that they might. What do we do? And many of the researchers are not in the case that we should then never kill an insect again. It's kind of impossible. But just considering the subjective experience of insects would or could change our welfare considerations for them in farming, for example.
It's sort of gruesome to sit through and think about how to end their lives in a way that would be as ethical as possible, because you sort of are like, wait, if they feel something, shouldn't we not harm them at all? But that's not the case for many other animals in our world already.
MARTÍNEZ: Could it possibly become an us versus them scenario? So for example, locusts that eat crops and cause damage and means that we don't have food to eat, or maybe mosquitoes that carry disease that cause human death, could it become one of those things where it's an us versus them scenario and we decide to pick and choose what insects we decide to be careful with and ones that we decide to eradicate?
LOVE: Sure. And I think that no one is saying that we should protect mosquitoes that cause disease. I think in the places that we can and it wouldn't be detrimental to human life, considering their welfare can often go hand in hand with human goals, right? If you give black soldier flies the food that they like when you're farming them, then they might produce more eggs, which is better for farming them, right?
So there are ways in which animal welfare doesn't always contradict the goals that humans have.
MARTÍNEZ: Considering how much you've researched this and looked into this, Shayla, how has your own view of insects evolved over time?
LOVE: I was a vegan for a long time, and I'm not anymore, and the story did almost make me a vegan again. But I think another way it impacted me, besides trying to not just mindlessly squish insects if it's not necessary, is the world feels a lot more populated to me now. I went to Washington Square Park with one of the bee researchers, Lars Chittka. I felt the park around me sort of fill up with living things 'cause I knew that we were surrounded by insects. That sense of wonder that we could just be surrounded by beings that have their own subjective experience was really cool and something, I think, learning about this topic really gave me.
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MARTÍNEZ: That was science reporter Shayla Love. You can read her story, "Do Insects Feel Pain," in The New Yorker.
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