Evidence is building that insects, octopus and other invertebrates feel emotions
Up until the mid-1980s, human babies didn’t feel pain.
Of course that’s not actually true, but due to research conducted in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was an attitude that still lingered among a small minority of scientists and medical professionals.
So much so that some infant surgery was still conducted without, or with very little, anaesthesia in the US into the ’80s.
Today, the question of physical and emotional experience has moved beyond humans to animals, including invertebrates like insects, crabs and octopus.
And it’s not just the feeling of pain that is being debated, but the whole spectrum of emotional experience: stress, joy, apprehension, even pleasure.
“Given the growing number of studies finding markers of emotions in animals, we’ve reached a tipping point,” philosopher Kristin Andrews tells the ABC.
Professor Andrews is a research chair in animal minds at the University of York in Canada.
Alongside biologist and primate behaviour expert Frans der Waal, Professor Andrews argues in a recent issue of Science that the weight of evidence says many invertebrates experience what we might call emotions, and that this morally matters. [Continue reading…]