(Beth Clifton photo)
Injuring invertebrates should bug the animal rights movement
by A. Rosen
While visiting India several years ago, I met people who practice the Jain religion. I think the Jain movement is ahead of the animal rights movement in some ways. For example, Jains include insects in their kindness to animals. I think that except for PETA, the animal rights movement turns its back on an estimated 90% of the animals on the planet, the insects. It’s not truly an “animal rights” movement. It’s a “fish-bird-reptile-mammal” movement.
Freddy the Fly
I believe insects have far more sentience than most people give them credit for. In Kinship With All Life (1976), one of the books that helped to launch the animal rights movement, J. Allen Boone devoted a chapter to a friendship that he had with Freddy the Fly.
I know someone who claimed to have relationships with mosquitoes. She showed me one of the mosquitoes. She could tell the difference in personalities between two mosquitoes who lived with her. I was inspired by her example, and I made friends with a spider. Like a cat or dog, he was scared at first, but hearing my sweet words, he gradually let me closer, and eventually I could pet him, and he rested on my hand.
Trap door spider.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Sentience
I think people fail to see the sentience in insects for the same reason that people failed to see the sentience in dolphins, apes, dogs and other animals. Now the research is out, and we know that we greatly underestimated these animals. Likewise, one day we will feel the same, I think, about the insects––that it was our ignorance that made us doubt their ability to feel love, fear, and other emotions.
“Without my walking stick I’d go insane.” –Irving Berlin (1938)
(Trish Conner photo)
Moral error
I feel ANIMALS 24-7 should, at the very least, investigate the issue of how sentient insects are, and whether the animal rights movement should include them. I think that to turn our backs on these creatures is a serious moral error.
Many animal rights activists who wouldn’t consider hurting a fish are smashing insects left and right. If the insects feel pain, how much suffering could be saved if publications like yours educated these activists about insects.
Veranda spider.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“I love all animals”
At least, introduce the possibility that insects may feel pain. Don’t just turn your back on them. They need you just as much as the cows and pigs do.
I love all animals, not just the furry, slimy, scaly, and feathery ones. On behalf of my suffering brothers and sisters, the insects, I ask you to please help them.
––A. Rosen, Ashland, Oregon
Buzz-back from ANIMALS 24-7:
We have often reported about scientific findings of sentience in invertebrates, and believe these findings are to be taken into account, especially in connection with such practices as boiling live crabs and lobsters for human consumption.
(Trish Conner photo)
Relevant ANIMALS 24-7 articles include:
EPA urges power plants to quit cooking fish & crustaceans alive
Tail-docking dogs & boiling crustaceans
Film “Indian Point” shows how nukes hit river life
Invertebrates feel stress, says Science, but D.C. no longer has a bughouse
Realism is in order
But realistic thinking about the human relationship with insects––and the relationships of other animals with insects––is in order.
Mosquito. (Beth Clifton photo)
Mosquitoes, for example, transmit dengue fever, malaria, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, and West Nile virus, among many other deadly diseases. Just these five diseases kill close to a million people per year now, and barely a decade ago killed twice that many. The mosquito toll on other species is many times higher. No land animal can remain healthy without finding some means of protection from mosquitoes, fleas, flies, ticks, and mites.
Further, the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization estimates that insects consume or render inedible about 20% of the cultivated food supply for humans and domesticated animals, despite intensive use of insecticides. Before the advent of insecticides in the mid-20th century, food crop losses to insects ran as high as 50%, and were a major cause of famine.
Wasp’s nest. (Beth Clifton photo)
Evolution
Less than half of 1% of all known insect species are harmful in any way to humans, or to our food crops and animals––but insects have evolved to parasitize or otherwise prey upon practically every other species, animal or plant, including each other. With due appreciation of insect pollinators, the evolution of non-insect animal species has come about largely through filling the ecological niche for insect control.
Pangolin. (Wikipedia photo)
Indeed, the entire mammalian order appears to have evolved from insectivores. Even today, more than half of all mammals are insectivores, along with most amphibians, more than half of all birds, and many reptiles and fish.
While insect sentience may be appreciated, living without harming insects is not a possibility for most vertebrate species, ourselves included.
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Loved this item. I grew up in the country, and insects were among my “playthings” as a country girl. I have my favorites, of course…ladybugs and praying mantises. Insects are a vital part of the world’s ecological balance, and each one has its place in that order. Must say, however, that, being a lifetime Louisianian, I have always wondered why there is a necessity for mosquitoes….can’t think of any. Also, I’ve been known to squash a black widow spider or two in my life…not sorry. Thanks for this great item. Keep up the good work!
An upsetting movement is crickets “to feed the world” in the form of high protein “snacks” and even the more “enlightened” health food people are buying not realizing the consequences of killing so many. Not only Jains but most Buddhists also will never kill an insect.
Thank you for this article.
This is an important issue in that it forces us to examine the consistency of our professed philosophy of “do no harm.,” which underlies much of animal rights. Admittedly insects can be dangerous parasites or vectors of disease, but the awareness of other beings as having as much right to life as I do has changed my attitudes and emotional reactions to them. As a child, I was petrified of all bugs, and even as an adult, certain insects filled me with revulsion. When I began to think about animal rights, I was forced to re=examine these attitudes and emotions and am at the point where bugs neither revolt or terrify me. When I find them in the house, I relocate them outside. It’s satisfying to know that an intellectual examination of one’s attitudes can actually affect one’s emotional responses. Nonetheless, if one’s life is threatened by an insect, or any animal, human or otherwise, I do not believe it is wrong to kill.
I am so glad that you got over your revulsion of insects…they can be intriguing to watch. I have always loved “bugs” ever since I toddled. You are right, though, of course, those that carry disease or threaten life must be dealt with differently.
If one assigns value to each individual living being, I don’t know how it would be possible to want to respect/have regard for/be kind to some and not others simply because of their appearance or species. Insects, for my part, are certainly more highly regarded than, say, those who abuse animals, or murderers, in my book. Spiders have great significance to many of my ancestors, and that has meant that I regard them well, too. A nest of paper wasps outside my front door did no harm to me and I asked my gardener not to disturb them; when they all left the nest, I removed it. A colony of bees took up residence on the side of our house, and after investigating all of the possibilities available to remove them, I left them alone, unwilling to take any lethal measures against them. They eventually moved on with no harm done to anyone. That said, I also dispatch black widow spiders, because I have in the past understood that they might seriously harm my loved ones or myself. Mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, and ants are not welcome in our home! I do try to live and let live, though, and I abhor the use of poisons and chemicals except where no viable alternative exists.
While I consider myself an animal liberationist, not only do my actions indicate I don’t value insects’ lives as much as my own, I don’t even value their lives as much as I value my “right” to drive a car. During many times of the year, it would be impossible to ride in a motorized vehicle without killing dozens of insects. If we knew that to take such a drive would necessarily kill dozens of humans, we certainly would opt not to do so. If I knew that driving a car would necessarily kill vertebrate animals, I wouldn’t do it.
We can make a utilitarian calculation that even though driving risks the lives of vertebrate animals (including humans) the good we do as animal activists by taking advantage of motorized transportation overcompensates for the few vertebrate animals we might kill over our lifetimes. But if it were a certainty that every time we drove we would necessarily be killing vertebrates, it would be much harder to justify.
Is it a moral error not to apply the same principle to insects? Let’s hope that, while insects certainly have responses to stimuli, they don’t have enough brain matter to be conscious of suffering in similar ways to humans. If they do, we have a holocaust of immense proportions on our hands.
A relevant consideration is that the full natural lifespan of most of the insects one is likely to hit while driving a car is measured in hours to days, at least in the winged form in which they are most vulnerable to being hit.
Are you saying insects’ lives are less valuable than vertebrate’s lives because they are so short-lived? This seems reasonable because you would be depriving vertebrates, but not insects, of a significant future.
I share the view that insects are sentient individuals and that we tend to assume that being tiny (relatively speaking) renders a being insentient. Recently a writer about food and animal issues, James McWilliams, who generally promotes veganism, wrote that insects are not sentient and that vegans should be comfortable eating them. I and other animal rights vegan advocates protested. I wrote a response, “Animal Rights Vegan Guilt”: http://www.upc-online.org/activism/150914_animal_rights_vegan_guilt.html
Thank you for this important discussion about insects. Karen Davis http://www.upc-online.org
The size of an animal does matter because awareness is a function of how large brains are. A fruit fly cannot possibly have the amount of awareness of a human.
While a fruit fly is unlikely to have the amount of awareness of a human, brain size and intelligence are largely different matters. For instance, people are often impressed by the intelligence of whales, and especially the size of their brains. But whale intelligence is in truth greatly overestimated, testing at about the same level as a dog — i.e., brighter than most animals, but not bright enough to evade human exploitation, and not really mentally efficient at all.
Bat intelligence, on the other hand, is hugely underestimated. A bat the size of a matchbook has equal or greater ability than a whale to communicate either vocally or by sub-audible signals, use sonar, navigate by day or night, live in large social groups with pair bonds and familial relationships, and adjust body pressure relative to the external atmosphere.
What a whale has that a bat does not is an enormous brain. However, whales have evolved for a mere 40 million years (and that may be stretching it) in an aquatic environment, where size is an enormous advantage: bulk floats, and big critters are less likely to be swallowed.
Bats have evolved possibly for as long as 250 million years (as long as the bird line, since the ancestors of bats appear to have separated from the reptiles not long after the ancestors of birds), in an aerial environment where size is an enormous disadvantage: bulk and weight take more energy to lift.
(There are other theories of the evolution of bats that suggest more recent origins, but even the shortest time frame makes bats about twice as old as whales.)
What we are looking at here are whales swimming around with UNIVAC between their ears, while bats have a super-advanced smartphone.
I wouldn’t argue that a larger brain automatically means more awareness (awareness being more important than “intelligence” for this discussion). However, there is an absolute limit as to how few neurons a brain can have before awareness is no longer possible and the animals with the smallest brains, such as insects, are most likely going to be closer to that number.
For example, there’s good reason to think that an insect whose limb has been smashed is not suffering like a human whose limb has been smashed–the human would be incapacitated, able to focus on little else, indicating great awareness of their lost limb. An insect can go about its day because its brain isn’t overwhelmed with an awareness of suffering and, I would argue, because its brain doesn’t contain enough neurons to facilitate such an awareness of suffering.
And while it might take away from our (anthropocentric) desire to want to appreciate the richness of insects’ inner lives, in reality, it’s a very good thing for insects that they don’t suffer the tortures of smashed limbs.
Says Queens University at Belfast researcher Robert Elwood, who has published several landmark studies of the crustacean capacity to feel pain, whose findings can be extrapolated to insects, “I think it must be regarded as a possibility that they experience anxiety and pain. And if we consider there is a possibility, then effective safeguards against inflicting pain should be taken just to be on the safe side, and we should also ensure they are killed rapidly.”
There are significant differences in how the limbs of insects, arachnids, and crustaceans are grown and connected to their bodies, compared to how the limbs of vertebrate animals are grown and connected, and therefore there is reason to suspect that insects, arachnids, and crustaceans are less incapacitated by pain when they lose a limb, but this is likely to involve matters of degree, not of distinction.
That brain development takes many years in humans (and many other vertebrates) is another indication that their brains are simply more capable of awareness than insects whose brains do not require a lengthy development. It’s not proof in itself, but a piece of evidence.
I too think insects are fascinating, but I am realistic in saying that there really is no “humane” way to rid a home of an infestation of termites, carpenter ants, or roaches or an animal or human of parasites without resorting to lethal means. I’ve actually had people try to argue with me that if I support animal rights, I should also oppose this basic self-defense against disease and destruction caused by insects. Um, no.
I think that most people who argue “on behalf of insects” are part of the “plants have feelings too” contingent, primarily concerned with pointing out that animal rights advocates are all hypocrites based on the fact that we have “inconsistent attitudes” with regard to every living being on the planet. It would be great if these folks really cared about the suffering and killing of creatures who are “not like us.” because this is an issue that needs to be examined seriously. The more we learn about the “higher animals,” the more we realize that they are “like us” in terms of sentience, emotions, etc. Most importantly, they interact with the world in unique ways that need to be respected, even if not fully understood. It is entirely possible that insects and plants have some level of “sentience” that we are, at this point, unable to understand or appreciate, just as “animals” were once regarded as little more than machines.. As an animal rights advocate, I believe this is an important line of inquiry. In the meantime, I try to do the least amount of harm possible