by Matthew Cobb
I feel very conflicited about this, which popped up in my Twitter feed. It relates to a video posted today on YouTube. It features what appear to be adolescents injecting a blood-engorged tick with hydrogen peroxide, and giggling while they do it. The result is fairly obvious – an extremely unpleasant and bloody froth, and demise of said arthropod, much to the apparent amusement of those involved. Neither interesting nor amusing nor informative.
Why am I conflicted? I don’t think ticks (or any arthropod) can feel pain. Ticks are pretty unpleasant parasites and if I had one on me (I have) I wouldn’t hesitate to kill it, and when, many years ago in Sheffield, Harry the cat came back with his head absolutely covered with the damn things, then I took a certain relish in killing them. And when I was 6, I put salt on slugs (of which I am not proud).
And yet, I think this video – and indeed the idea of the childish ‘experiment’ – is pretty vile. Watching an animal – even a tick – die for pleasure seems distinctly unpleasant to me. Is this my over-active theory of mind playing up? Or my lily-livered hypocritical carnivore’s overly-developed sensibility? What do you think?
As I was composing this post, the video was available here and here (on each site, the comments are instructive). When I finished composing, it had been taken down by YouTube, so if you click on those links you won’t be able to watch it. It’ll probably get posted again, and then there will be cat and mouse game with the YouTube mods…
I’m not trying to reproduce it here for reasons of taste – this isn’t my blog, after all.
I watched this video a few hours ago. I too found it quite disturbing. It wasn’t watching the tick die in a horrible frothy explosion that bothered me, it was the children laughing with the effort they must have gone through to use a syringe full of Hydrogen Peroxide and film it. A quick unmeditated squish wouldn’t have bothered me. They seemed quite psychotic in taking pleasure of that tick’s death. The reasoning they gave is that it bit their pony and an “eye for an eye.” So I assume their pony also died from this tick, or it’s relatives living on the pony.
Through websites like this I have started to find insects and arachnids quite cute and fascinating. I can’t say if I were their age again I wouldn’t have laughed the same way.
Even if ticks caused the death of their pony, there is no ethical justification for their biblical lust for “eye for an eye.”
Additionally, I would think that some adults would have known of their plans when the kids acquired a syringe and hydrogen peroxide. Any adult with an ethical mind would have talked the kids around their blood lust. You know, seize the opportunity to teach them a valuable lesson, that taking glee when torturing and killing a life form makes you no better than the tick that killed your pony.
And if secular parents, an extra lesson would have been, hey, the so-called moral book, that is, the bible, sure has to be cherry picked in order for it to have any ethical value and wisdom, if one of its exhortations is the very primitive “eye for an eye.”
But if these kids just have a low capacity for empathy, then they may need more than the average lesson about the negative aspects of enjoying the mistreatment of a living creature.
Well said.
“taking glee when torturing and killing a life form makes you no better than the tick that killed your pony”
Strangely anthropomorphic, this reasoning.
The tick doesn’t really have a choice, nor can it be thought of as evil in any way.
Killing the tick in a slow roundabout way for your own pleasure is sick, but not for this reason.
Tics give me the wiggins. I pulled one off my dog last week before it was engorged and with its feet wiggling, washed it down the sink. I also put salt on leeches but in my defence, they were wrapped around my 3 year old toes and there was no other easier way to remove them.
I actually feel bad hurting anything. I even catch flies and spiders and put them outside. Perhaps it is our highly developed empathy after all those years of humanizing post enlightenment.
…and it was more my parents that tortured the leeches as I was (like my toes) only 3 at the time. 🙂
That’s not torture, that’s self defence.
Yeah? What about catching flies and tossing them into spider webs?
“Yeah? What about catching flies and tossing them into spider webs?”
The Significant Other occasionally does this when she “adopts” a house spider or two.
Seriously.
Oh, and don’t catch spiders. They will all nail you.
Why would one think arthropods can not feel pain?
I was thinking the same thing too. I seem to remember that if you put a lit match near a tick, it would try to get away.
Can’t stand the blood-sucking things though … squish!
Non-engorged ticks are nearly impossible to squish. Dismembering is often the only option. (But not gleefully.)
Don’t squish . . . pop the head off. Hiking in the woods of Kentucky during the summertime (well, actually we are now starting to find them in Feb!) I have become very adept at placing the head of the tick between two fingernails and putting an end to that particular parasite. Mind you, I do not go about seeking them out. I only do this to those creatures who sought me out.
That’s basically what I meant. I suppose beheading would have been a better choice of words. 🙂
But even that can be difficult at times–tiny head, big fingers…
I’ve found a few ticks crawling around on my clothing but I’ve only found one that had set up feeding on my blood. After finding that one, I spend several hours trying to figure out what to do once they attach, as I wanted to do what a could to minimize the chance of contracting Lyme disease. I found some contradictory information so I made my decisions based on how reliable the source should be, that is, giving credit to health organizations above thoughts expressed on a random blog. I don’t have immediate access to my notes so the following is from memory and may lack some accuracy.
– Ticks don’t have heads, they have mouth parts, bodies, and legs but, no heads.
– Ticks have a tendency to regurgitate when they are stressed, so it is best to remove the tick with as little trauma as possible. That means no matches as the tick finds removing its mouth parts to be a difficult task and is just as likely to die from the heat before it is able to extract itself and very likely to regurgitate even if it successfully extracts itself.
– Regarding the regurgitation, any disease that the tick is carrying is probably present on the mouth parts but less concentrated then within the ticks body. Once the tick has attached the exposure to any disease has probably occurred so the regurgitation, if it occurs, isn’t as significant as it might otherwise seem. However, it is still best to minimize the exposure as much as possible.
– The best way to remove a tick is to have an elongated(thin) tweezers and to grab the tick as close to the attachment point as possible and pull it out with a quick movement. The idea is that the tweezers will help minimize the amount of regurgitate that will be passed into the wound. Not to worry excessively though because once the mouth parts are in then some exposure to the disease has already occurred. Maybe the worst way to remove a tick is to grab its body and squeeze while pulling as that will squeeze the contents of the ticks body into the wound. Flicking the tick off with a thin object placed to contact the attachment point first is acceptable.
– During tick removal it is possible and maybe even likely that the mouth parts will break off. Don’t worry too much about that as the mouth parts a very small and will dissolve. Digging around trying to remove any broken off mouth parts is likely to do more harm than good.
– Ticks can sometimes live for a couple of years without feeding.
– Although ticks aren’t delicate, meaning they are good survivalists, they generally won’t survive a trip through the washing machine and dryer.
– Ticks range in size from just perceptible to the human eye to abut the size of a pencil eraser.
“What do you think?”
I agree with you. As a child, I remembering similarly abusing roly polies and my mother put a stop to it. I think she was right to do so. Killing for amusement strikes me as inherently immoral.
These kids will be perfect Abu Ghraib soldiers when they grow up.
If an animal cannot feel pain, how would it know to avoid things that might injure it?
Wouldn’t evolution quickly drive such beings to extinction?
And why would it struggle to avoid death?
It is important to avoid equivocation when using words like pain or struggle. It is very easy to describe sensory mechanisms that cause physical movements analogous to human behavior, but are entirely absent the cognitive element that is demonstrable in “higher” animals. Even as humans, we are constantly reacting at a physiologic level to various stimuli that do not engage our self awareness.
I understand this. But what is the evidence arthropods can’t feel pain? What is the evidence they can?
I can accept that they feel pain, but they do not have a brain that could build a sense of self or monitor the passage of time like a mammal. So it is hard for me to believe that they can ‘suffer’ psychological damage like a mammal. I am not at all concerned for the tick, as millions of arthropods are killed quickly or slowly everyday.
What concerns me is the ugliness of the higher primates in the video. Oh, I had burned my share of ants with a magnifying glass, and even performed live head transplants on grasshoppers as a kid. Call me a pot calling the kettle black on that score. Posting this on You Tube is to shout out cruelty with pride. I would not have done that.
“Call me a pot calling the kettle black on that score.”
Just to reconfirm, is a kettle bigger than a pot? 😉
(Also, a cauldron is bigger than a kettle, right?)
As in calling me a pot when I was, say, 10 years old. I was probably taller than these kids.
They do have a nervous system….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod#Internal_organs
Their nervous system lacks structures which in the mammalian brain are responsible for awareness and higher cognitive functions. Thus, it is virtually certain that their experience of the world is dramatically different from ours.
“Mammalian brain”, what has dinosaurs done to you? I think some birds have shown they are pretty aware and cognitive. Say the beat keeping Snowball.
Mostly I think this is an unsupported claim. Arthropods have, it has been claimed, central neuronal tissue homologous to the cortex of vertebrates (the mushroom bodies). Simple models of cortex tissue forms symbols while learning, the only known neural networks that do so (to my knowledge). And bees learn.*
I don’t see anything here what would be missing from advanced processing of pain. Not self awareness obviously, but learning about and avoiding pain, at least in some arthropods.
And that should be enough. If we don’t kick cats we shouldn’t kick ticks IMHO, at least until we know more. (Kill foods and pests, certainly. But not kick for fun.)
*More specifically, symbol formation avoids the overtraining of simple networks. Bees learn without overtraining, testing the model yet again.
+ 1
I made a reference to the mammalian brain in order to relate the issue to the human experience (which is practically impossible, that is the point of my post). Of course the cerebral cortex is present in the brain of most vertebrates, but the issue at hand is not how the tick’s suffering is similar to that of a bird or a dinosaur, but how it relates to the human concept of pain. It is commonly accepted that the more similar the given animal’s nervous system is to ours, the more consideration is given to their possible suffering. How else do you propose to solve this issue? Would you give the same consideration to ticks as to chimps?
Mushroom bodies have similar gene expression patterns to some neurons in the cerebral cortex, hence it has been proposed that they are of the same evolutionary origin. That does not imply that their function is the same; in fact, we know it is not.
But self awareness has nothing to do with how pain is processed. The brain reacts to pain while it is minimally conscious. [ http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2008/10/09-01.html ].
What the brain does as a whole is different since anesthetic drugs for example uncouple different parts of the brain. You may feel pain but not being able to act on it, and not remember the sensation afterwards as no memory is formed.
It has everything to do with how we define pain and with a host of ethical issues associated with it – including whether it is ethical to injure a tick.
Reacting and experiencing are two completely different things – that’s the point of this whole thread. There is no doubt that animals react to damaging stimuli; how they experience that process, we can only speculate based on their brain structure.
So your claim is that people undergoing surgery feel extreme pain, but they can’t react to it and don’t form a memory of it? Tell that to an anasthesiologist.
And what about local anesthesia? The last time my dentist did a root canal, I was concious all the time and didn’t feel a thing. Or is your claim that I simply don’t remember?
The nervous system processing information (in this case, reacting against noxious stimuli) is not the same as “feeling”. Feeling requires some level of consciousness, which in turn requires a fairly complex brain. But avoiding injury can be executed even by the simplest unicellular organisms.
Having said that, I would refrain from the judgement on whether arthropods can feel pain (my understanding is that they don’t, not in any sense similar to our feeling, but that touches on the definition of feeling itself). And I probably would be disgusted by the video (I didn’t see it).
I seem to recall that paramecia can move away from harmful substances by detecting chemical gradients. But it would be unnecessarily anthropomorphic to say they were in “pain” and doing it for that reason.
We also move away from harmful substances by detecting chemical gradients. I react to the thorn pressing against my skin because molecules in my body are undergoing chemical reactions that occur due to electrical attractions between them and moledules in the thorn.
I don’t know arthropods too well, but it would surprise me if not early complex animals wouldn’t have evolved something homologous to pain receptors. Maybe before sponges, I just read a biologist the other week that says he is fighting the consensus of sponges not having something homologous to a nervous system.
How different animals process and react to these receptors would vary of course, I’m reminded of the analysis on fetuses, which are claimed to not feel pain before week 23 (or so) because the receptors aren’t yet hooked up to a central nervous system (CNS).
However, adult arthropods have a CNS, so they would “feel” pain, in their own way.
Totally agree. I am reminded of the quote from this website (I think) “We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”
“…it was the children laughing with the effort they must have gone through to use a syringe full of Hydrogen Peroxide and film it.”
I agree. It doesn’t make any difference whether the creature could feel pain or not. The important thing is that those kids thought it could and thought it funny. It demonstrates a truly chilling lack of empathy.
Or perhaps they empathised hugely with their pony and did to the tick what they may well have done if the tick had attached itself to one of them. Eye for an eye may be primitive justice but it is still form of justice. Ticks may well be capable of feeling something but nothing like what weunderstant to be conscious pain, I am as good as certain.
And what we feel as conscious pain is going to be very close to what a pony would – though with substantially less of a sense of it being “me” that is in pain. The tick’s sense of its own being is going to be nothing like a pony’s and even less like a boy’s. Where’s your human understanding for two silly little boys here? You do tick empathy well enough.
Anytime a person enjoys watching any living thing die, I worry for the emotional/psychological well-being of that person.
Public executions used to be popular entertainment. I don’t imagine that those people who would be horrified by such a spectacle now are really that much different from those who would have relished it back in the day.
I would be concerned even if those children made a cardboard cutout of an animal and then “tortured” it.
I’m pretty sure this experimental technique was first introduced by Angelo Buono.
I don’t have any great love for parasites (arthropod or other), but if there is anything that might (or not) separate the human animal from the rest of nature it is the ability to choose not to kill.
What’s worse: the video or eating animal products and ignoring how you acquired them?
Yes, this goes over the line, whether or not ticks feel pain. Death is a necessary part of life, and killing is sometimes necessary. I’m no vegetarian! However, killing ends a life and it seems to me that if we’re the kind of humans worthy of respect, we respect the life that’s lost, however willingly we joined in ending it. This laughter . . . no.
Agree completely. One wonders where else on the tree of life such perverse biophobia will travel. Even if ticks (in May & June here we wage perpetual war on them, and even if they walk on me,and barely dig in, I itch for many days. They die an almost instant death in a jar of alcohol. By July there are hundreds of corpses). feel no pain as we define it, torture is always bad. And the glee in it worse.
Interesting. We stick ours in alcohol, too. But I’ve found some remain alive for an alarming amount of time.
Also, our tick bites seldom, if ever, itch. (Dog ticks.) Just had a deer tick on me last week, though, and that bite was noticeably painful for days.
I expect ticks experience something we’d call pain, and this sort of behavior by adolescents, while common, is disturbing.
However, it got me wondering. If animals evolved pain to avoid threats to their survival, why not plants?
Plants can’t really do much to react to pain, like move awaq, so perhaps ‘pain’ serves no purpose to a plant. They do react to damage however by secreting compounds of various kinds. Perhaps a plant biologist can enlighten us further as to the exact mechanisms. 🙂
I think you are quite right. Does this entitle us to expect that ticks feel pain but trees do not? Can we be sure the bark beetle does not cause the pine tree pain? (No, I don’t talk to the trees. 🙂 ) Do we know enough about the physiology of pain to care about the pain of ticks but not trees?
Plants feel pain — haven’t you read Roald Dahl’s short story “The Sound Machine”??
I remember seeing it on tv years ago on “tales of the unknown” or something like that.
I am not serious about trees feeling pain, of course. I am trying to understand why we are so sure ticks feel pain and trees do not. I think the answer is nociceptors.
What’s next? I think when you see kids laughing about something like this it causes you to wonder how far they might go—crickets, turtles, cats… Hopefully someone will catch these kids and steer them away from this kind of thing before they find torture to be a form of recreation and entertainment.
(Any Dexter fans out there? Dexter started with animals. The last season starts soon so it is on my mind.)
I think most young kids have an imagination that requires them to ask, “What would happen if..?” This impulse includes animals, particularly insects, reptiles and amphibians.
Without going into disturbing detail, I and my fellow roving 10 and 11 year-old miscreants, had we done to humans what we did to small defenseless animals, would surely be brought before the Hague Court.
As a father of an imaginative boy, many of those memories came back to me, and I am not proud of them. In fact, Over the years, I’ve become something of a secular Jainist – walking after a rain, I even attempt to save as many sidewalk-stranded earth worms as I can.
I used to mix up ants from one ant hill with ants from another ant hill and stir it up so they’d fight. Usually they also turned on my and ran up my legs and bit me.
I would like to think there is a problematic gradient in behavior, or at least a problem of drawing a rigorous line for acceptable behavior.
But it seems to me behavioral scientists are all over the place, some seems to say it doesn’t matter for more serious problematic behavior, some seems to say it is a first step towards such.
Maybe more research is needed there. Until then, it would be prudent (and morally rewarding) to frown on such behavior.
People routinely kill arthropods in any number of ways, including squashing, poisoning, and cooking. At least for the smaller ones, I think it’s fair to say their brains are far too small for producing anything like the sensation of pain larger animals are familiar with.
This was a doomed arachnid. The only element added by injecting hydrogen peroxide instead of just squishing it was a bit of scientific curiosity concerning exactly what would happen.
I think the suggestion that the kids are in any way psychopathic because of this is beyond the pale. The notion that they’re on some kind of slippery slope to torturing small animals (as we always hear serial killers did in their youth) is quite outrageous.
+1
Joy in the perceived pain of any biospheric being is just a short adolescent step away from book* burning and then on to brutalize humans they define as “the other.”
*no doubt the least informed among the torturers skip this stage
Ugh! First off I don’t like bugs (I’m an engineer, not a biologist). Second, I find no amusement in torturing anything just to watch it die. It speaks to some dark, twisted recess in the human psyche that I wish were not there (but obviously is, just visit the Tower of London for one example).
This seems to me less of a case of ‘torture’ and more a case of these teenagers asserting their dominance over a creature in (what is admittedly) a rather elaborate way. If the tick had been a peer falling down the stairs, wouldn’t the reaction had been the same? Or even a peer pushed down the stairs? Children/teenagers/adults, even, do horrible things to one another. I think it’s different from sadism. It’s just an appalling way of asserting dominance.
I think of the ichneumonidae wasp and its selective stinging/paralyzing of specific ganglia of a caterpillar, mentioned in Dawkins’s “The God Delusion.”
When I was 12 or so I shot a robin with a BB gun. I instantly became almost physically sick with remorse. And now I think, what if it had been a rat in the chicken house? I don’t think I would have been quite so stricken. What if I put rat poison out instead? Speaking of chickens, they mercilessly gang up on one at the least indication of injury or weakness. Is that the latent reptile in them?
(Too, do we human mammals have some latent reptilianess in us, however residual, to partially explain our cruelty?)
At around the same age, I had several Dutch rabbits. Didn’t go around their cage for going on two weeks. Totally irresponsible. Totally inexcusable. Complete craniorectumitis. One was dead, the others skin and bones. They survived. My inhumanity haunted me for a long time.
A few years earlier, age 9, let my precious little dachshund roam where she might. One day my mother, her father’s (below) daughter and pretty much sparing any subtlty, with neither sympathy nor consolation offered, bluntly informed me that the dog had been run over and was dead. Copious tears. Lesson learned. Should have remembered it a few years later with the robin.
When I was 5 or 6 I would go with my grandfather to his small farm, where he had some chicks in a cage. I thought of them as pets of course. Would reach in and grab it and hold it. It would soon settle down and softly cluck. Warm to the touch. Smooth, delicate feathers. Time passed and the chickens grew. Then one day, when I was outside near the cage, my grandfather, without saying anything, reached in and pulled out a chicken by the leg, walked over near the house he had built, grabbed the chicken by the neck and whirled it around in a great arc, coming to a sudden stop, wringing its neck and popping off its head. I watched with incredibly shocked fascination (?) as he did this several times in a row. While I would not then have had the required vocabulary to describe my thoughts, it seemed to me that there was somehow a nerve bundle purposefully directing the running of the headless chicken. (Early wireless?)
(Have you been to a commercial slaughterhouse? What’s the fancy word in Europe – abbatoir? An eye-opener for me. Perhaps it would be a good field trip for narcissistic, self-entitled Amuricun middle- and high-schoolers.)
A year or so before that, my grandfather had taken a bunch of toilet paper and placed it against the revolving pulley assembly on the back of his tractor to rub off the excess grease he had put on. Apparently it was too much of an inconvenience to shut down the tractor engine. The result was that the pulley belt caught his hand and amputated his index and middle fingers. (Quite reckless -he was always telling the rest of us to be careful but not holding himself to the same standard. He once rode his tractor up too steep a grade and it tipped back with him. Very lucky to escape injury.)
Years later, a stray tomcat arrived at his house to set up residence. He took a liking to it, remarking – quite notable for him as he was pretty much the taciturn, stoic young adult of The Great Depression – words to the effect that he was not accustomed to treating animals as pets (but as livestock). Pretty tight with his money, especially with his wife, my grandmother, causing much resentment in his children.
(His reputation for tightness was a local legend in a community known for tight-fistedness. Let’s call him “Smith,” and another party “Jones.” One day, in the presence of a Mrs. Jones, he saw a rabbit. The context of this is that, during the Great Depression, mountain people hunted and otherwise did what they had to do to put food on the table. He said, “Oh, there goes a poor little rabbit. It’s a wonder that thar ain’t a Jones after it.” Without missing a beat she replied, “Yes, and if it had a nickel in its ass there’d be a Smith after it!” He was rarely bested in such repartee, but he met his match that day.)
This had an adverse effect on the tomcat, as my grandfather, possessed of quite a bit of self-sufficient grit characteristic of the “old-timers” of Yesteryear, fancied himself quite capable of neutering the cat, thereby saving money from going to the vet. However capable, and however much he presumed others should applaud his surgical skills, he did it without any anaesthesia. The cat survived. I held my tongue because circumstances were such that I necessarily had to keep open a line of communication with him. But it made me somewhat less sympathetic to him about his tractor accident.
To end this crank’s rant regarding man’s inhumanity to man and other creatures: for years my grandfather enjoyed what he called “fox racing.” He and others would load up their foxhounds in their pickup trucks or small trailers and go to certain then-remote parts of the county, letting the dogs out to chase what fox they might encounter. Can’t prove it, but I gather that the dogs rarely caught the fox. They’d sit around a campfire for most of the night, listening to the dogs, each of which had its own distinctive “bay,” and by which their owners claimed they could determine whose dog was hot on the trail and leading the pack.
Years later, in the mid-80’s, I “took a shine” to a young lady (though she not to me), and on one of my visits had the occasion to meet her father, retired from the CIA. We talked a bit about the CIA, and about this and that other thing. We somehow got off on local old mountain ways of yesteryear, and I – innocently-enough I thought – mentioned the fox racing. He took offense at that custom, labelling it, among other words and sentiments, barbaric.
Perhaps it was and is barbaric. Nevertheless, that sounded pretty rich coming from someone affiliated with an organization that, e.g., was involved with the overthrow of democratically-elected governments in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950’s, with a great loss of civilian life, and at that present time was embroiled in the Iran-Contra fiasco. A 55-gal. drum calling the pot black. But I kept my mouth shut so as to keep the peace, such was the “accommodationist” in me, thinking I still had a chance with the young lady. 😉
A thousand apologies for my bloviation.
tl;dr you don’t like reptiles.
It’s heartening to see the majority of commenters horrified at the killing of the tick. Reading these comments while in the middle of reading Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature seems in line with what Pinker’s hypothesis.
I’m taking this as a forum for confessing pleasure in arthropods’ death.
(1) I worked in a Spartina marsh, where I was tortured endlessly by greenhead flies. Come August, when I could catch them, I would hold them underwater for a few seconds, then watch them drift on the surface until found by a juvenile bluefish. I confess to finding that tremendously enjoyable.
(2) I was in the audience for a terrarium match between a wolf spider and a preying mantis. I’m guessing most biologists here would know where to put their money. But, again, I confess to having been entertained.
Hey, look, in both instances third parties benefited.
An ecologist friend came down with Lyme Disease contracted when out in the field. Particularly given what he went thru, I don’t care about what happens to any tick.
That said, I tried for years, unsuccessfully, to keep my daughter from smashing spiders. However, she has gone on to be a dog rescue crusader, battling Jesus freaks in the process.
You mean she didn’t turn into a sadistic torturer of “the other”, after all that practice murdering poor defenseless little arthropods?
Why, one might get an inkling that a huge number of comments here are somewhat overwrought.
+1000
Just got back from a party. A little drunk. Lets see…
There is marvelous complexity in even small invertebrates like a tick. Of course arthropods have pain receptors, and their stimulation causes an arthropod to move away from the stimulus with top priority. That makes perfect adaptive sense, but that does not mean they experience pain in the emotional way that we bigger brained animals would.
I am delighted to learn of the possibility, mentioned in a post above, of distant homologies between arthropod mushroom bodies and the cerebral cortex (homology by gene expression). But remember these structures are tiny, maybe a hundred nerve cells? (I am guessing, but seems reasonable). So for now, unless I learn differently, I would consider it very unlikely that a tick has the ability to feel pain in the emotional way of psychic trauma that we do. That said, some arthropods are pretty brainy. Mantis shrimps for example.
My issue with this whole thing about wantonly torturing a ‘bug’ and crowing about it is that it is immoral. I experience it as immoral b/c it is a symbol of cruelty against higher animals. We, our species, have a marvelous sense of instinctive fairness and empathy and this stuff triggers that feeling. We immediately project how a mammal would feel, and it makes us feel revolted.
I agree with everything you wrote, except for the estimate of cell numbers in the arthropod brain. I don’t know about arachnids, but the mushroom body of Drosophila (fruit fly) is composed of approximately 2500 neurons (Kenyon cells), while the same structure of honey bee contains approximately 170,000 Kenyon cells. Since the mushroom body is the “learning and memory center” of the insect nervous system and it is particulary associated with the olfactory functions, it is not surprizing that it is relatively advanced in bees, which rely heavily on chemical and spacial memory for their social interactions and survival.
That is good to know!
I think we need to be very careful about statements of who experiences what, and how they compare. If science has shown anything over the centuries it is that man almost always occupies a less central, less special place than he thinks he does.
Of course we need to be careful, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t explore this issue. Otherwise, how would we be able to make moral judgements about our treatment of other living things?
For example, research institutions review all proposed animal experiments in order to enforce certain ethical standards. These standards are based on our scientific understanding (admittedly incomplete) of how different animals experience pain and distress. Thus, these regulations are much stricter and more detailed for vertebrate animals than invertebrates.
I have to admit I get considerable satisfaction from perpetrating mass chemical death on a wasps nest. And this is partly related to the knowledge of what many species of wasps do to insects they capture.
On the other hand, I won’t kill spiders. Or praying mantises. Cockroaches yes, and centipedes. And flies. And ants. As rapidly and effectively as possible. But I wouldn’t consider any of that worth putting on Youtube…
(If anyone feels like pointing out that my pesticidal feelings towards insects are inconsistent and irrational I won’t argue. And if anyone points out that spiders and centipedes aren’t insects I may well extend my lethality to include pedanticide 😉
Is there any inclusive term for insect-sized creepy-crawlies other than ‘bugs’?
Is there any inclusive term for insect-sized creepy-crawlies other than ‘bugs’?
Arthropods
Well that is not good – many of those insects are ‘pests’ to human food sources. I do not think we should be so judgemantal about what life has a right to live & what does not. What you say makes me eager to re-double my efforts to save as many wasps as possible!
That (trying to save wasps) would be truly perverse, considering their habits. Or are you just saying that to contradict the satisfaction (I won’t say enjoyment because it isn’t) I get from killing wasps?
But then I see you consider wiping out ‘a species’ such as smallpox is wrong. Leaving aside whether a strain of bacteria (or virus? whatever) can be called a ‘species’, I don’t think your position is logically defensible.
It certainly seems a little extreme.
What’s wrong with wasps? They may have to be removed from inappropriate nest sites, but otherwise they play important roles in the ecosystem.
I do disagree with Dom about smallpox & guinea worm!
The way they carefully paralyse a caterpillar so their larvae can eat it alive, for starters.
Plus, of course, they’re extremely unpleasant insects to encounter in the wild. What other flying insect is capable of, at the worst, killing you?
If they were removed completely the ecosystem would adjust, I’m sure (just as it’s adjusted to every other evolutionary change since the days of the dinosaurs and before).
They control the population of destructive caterpillars and other pests; organic gardeners are glad to have them around. Very few are potentially fatal. They’re hugely important in biocontrol methodologies.
Depending on which source you look at, there are 75,000 to 100,000 (or more!) species of wasps. I think the ecosystem(s) would notice their absence.
I’m sure the organic gardeners are pleased to have the caterpillars slowly eaten to death in a way that makes exploding ticks look quite humane. Wouldn’t it be kinder to the caterpillars to just squirt them with nasty chemicals and get it over with?
But, basically, we started messing with the ecosystem as soon as we started farming. Suppose instead of removing all 75000 species, I just settled for exterminating the nasty fat yellow ones that build nests near houses and have spread enormously in recent years (in this country at least), probably because of some sort of human-caused influence – would that be all right?
Yes.
Otherwise, remember what happens when an important predator (and parasitoids like this play the role of predator, albeit internally!) is removed from any ecosystem.
(It’s far more than organic gardeners who need wasps! That just came to mind due to my experiences with natural pest control. Numerous plant species as well benefit from inroads in the caterpillar populations. Wasps parasitize biting flies that otherwise debilitate livestock and wild mammals. Etc.)
Note–for a brief but fascinating overview of parasitoid wasp/host coevolution, see here–esp. the parts about polynavirus and host defenses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid_wasp
I must admit to relishing killing mosquitoes. Especially with one of those high voltage electrocuting tennis racquets.
There’s something very satisfying about the crack and sparks.
What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s mind when it hits your car’s wind shield?
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It’s arse
Did you use the “B” word…;)
Jerry, it,s the rubicon of civilization which demarcates the savage from the citizen. In children it’s to be expected since, dear as they are to us, they are not fully civilized. Less excuse is found for the ten mile backups at an accident scene created by all the morbid rubberneckers. There are light years separating people on this issue. For sure apologists who see no real issue here will froth. We have created (professional) sports and it’s culture just to ablate the blood lust.
Come on, rubbernecking an accident is a savage response?? It’s a universal, completely human response that we undertake to better understand ourselves and our place in the world and the universe. That could have been me. Who doesn’t wonder at that?
Humans aren’t angels, but that doesn’t make us devils, either.
Indeed, chimps do the same thing. I’ve heard it’s a way to think about how to avoid that happening to you.
…but not driving cars
I think it is objectionable to take pleasure in killing but then I eat meat.
I find it hard to believe ticks feel no pain as they have a nervous system. It is a very basic response for all life form to avoid unpleasant environmets which encompasses pain.
I also think deliberately wiping out a species such as smallpox or guinea worm, is wrong, but then I have not got smallpox & do not suffer from guinea worm.
The second link worked for me. Couldn’t help trying. It’s pretty gross…
I haven’t watched the video, so I don’t know if I’m missing something egregious in the children’s behavior. But to answer Matthew’s question, I think that what’s actually enjoyable about things like this is doing something in the world and seeing interesting results. In other words, the killing is a side effect, and perhaps no one is getting any joy out of that. If it were possible to inject a tick with peroxide in a video game, it would be interesting to do so just to see what would happen – and this act wouldn’t involve any actual killing. So I don’t think the killing is central (or even important) to the entertainment.