Pain largely a matter of mind for animals
Last week I was fishing for perch using night crawlers. The night crawlers were too large for my small hook, so I cut the crawlers in thirds and impaled a night crawler part onto my hook.
As I was cutting the night crawler and putting it on the hook, I wondered if I were making the worm suffer pain as we humans experience pain.
The same thought about pain in animals has occurred to me as I catch fish or shoot game animals. Do animals suffer the same as I would if someone were dragging me through the water with a steel hook through my lips?
To answer that question, I went back to reread a fascinating article on fish pain by Dr. James D. Rose in an old In-Fisherman magazine.
The short answer to the question is no. Most animals do not feel pain similar to humans. It has to do with the size of the brain as well as the makeup of the brain.
Human brains have a large cerebral hemisphere and a brain stem connected to a spinal cord which is connected to a nervous system that extends to nerve endings throughout our body, including our skin.
If we were hunting in Eastern Montana and accidentally sat on a prickly pear plant, we would react two ways. First, the prickly pear spline would stimulate a nerve in our skin to send a neural impulse back to the spinal cord and brain stem which tells us this is an injurious event and that we ought to pull back from the prickly pear to avoid further injury.
A fish reacts the same way because it has a small brain with a relatively large brain stem. It needs to react to injury-causing events to avoid further injury and survive.
But in the human nervous system, the prickly pear stimulus continues past the brain stem to the large cerebral hemisphere which tells us the prickly pear incident hurt like the dickens. So we continue to react to the injurious event as a response to the pain we feel.
Because fish and other primitive forms of animals do not have large cerebral hemispheres in their brains, the survival stimuli does not tell them that stimuli is also painful.
Therefore when a fish pulls back on your fishing line, it is a survival instinct and probably not a reaction to the pain of having a hook in its mouth.
On Saturday, I will join thousands of other Montana archers trying to bag a bull elk with my archery equipment. Some nonhunters will wonder how hunters, who profess to love game animals, can hurt an animal by killing it.
I believe prey animals such as elk and deer, similar to fish, do not feel pain similar to humans. If you shoot an elk with a rifle, it will flee. I think this is more of its survival reaction to the strange loud noise of the rifle shot than it is the impact of the bullet.
I have a friend, who while archery hunting, shot a grazing elk through both lungs. The elk jumped as if it had been stung by a bee, then went back to quietly grazing. A minute or so later, its legs got wobbly and it finally collapsed dead. It showed no reaction to the possible pain of having been shot through the rib cage and both lungs with the razor-sharp arrow.
We've all seen videos of a mother wildebeest in Africa valiantly fighting to save her calf from a hunting lion. Finally the lion is able to separate calf and mother and kills the calf. Soon the mother is calmly grazing a hundred feet from where the lion is devouring her calf.
That tells me she does not feel the same physical or psychological pain as humans.
So as fishermen and hunters, we have a human need to make clean, instant kills of our prey. But we can feel comfortable knowing our prey probably will not experience physical or psychological pain as we know it.