Debate Over Fish Pain at Animal Consciousness 2017
Conference Implies the Ethical Problems with Vivisection
by John Otrompke, JD
‘Animal Consciousness,’ a two-day meeting held in New York last month, was a forum for a variety of perspectives- neurological, philosophical, and ethical.
Comparative consciousness is indeed a fascinating field of endeavor, which apparently has brought us to a truer understanding of a topic which for centuries was full of mystical mumbo-jumbo, Cartesian reductionism, and more phantoms than Coleridge’s opium dream.
But when comparative cognition research is conducted by exploiting animals, there can be no doubt that it is unethical and inherently self-defeating. Indeed, science has confirmed that animals can think and can suffer (a truth regarding which there could be less doubt than ‘I think therefore I am’).
For non-human animals, like people, are gene-reproducing machines, with a desire for life and well-being that should not frustrated for the sake of pure research. Regarding applied research into treatments for fatal diseases like Alzheimer’s, animal research is seldom ethical, and probably always unnecessary.
A Personal Anecdote Regarding Suffering Animals from Bear Mountain Zoo
Some years ago I had my own experience with the notion of animals as automatons. I was hiking through the Bear Mountain Zoo along the Appalachian Trail in upstate New York, and upon inspecting several of the animals, I noticed a troubling distinction.
The coyotes, for example, didn't seem to be especially unhappy as they were grouped together in a large, circular pen. However, the porcupine and the river otter were both obviously beside themselves with grief and anxiety, pacing within their small cell-like enclosures.
Yet a sign beside the trail advised visitors not to worry about the animals; according to the sign, they were only pacing to get exercise.
As it happened, I learned what kind of a sound the porcupine makes on this visit, which could be compared to that of a xylophone. But the animal's cry rendered it even more obvious to me that it had both emotions and the consciousness of its predicament.
But the biggest contrast was with the human being on the scene, a docent who sat in a chair beside the enclosure, calmly reading a book, and behaving very much like an automaton.
This refusal to recognize the obvious motives for the movements and communications of those two animals in particular was especially troubling. I don't t reduce the behavior of the porcupine or the river otter to the functioning of an automaton, nor the deliberate disregard by the docent of their suffering.
Debating the Unthinkable
Notwithstanding incremental advances made to eliminate animal testing in the last two years (1), it may be relevant that certain conceptual disagreements made themselves known at the conference somewhat ironically entitled ‘Animal Consciousness’ in New York last month. (2)
But while academics split hairs over animal consciousness, other researchers try to learn about the minds of animals by subjecting them to vivisection, as one unfortunate marmoset monkey at the University of Utah recently learned the hard way. (3)
Among other topics discussed at the conference, several speakers on Nov. 17 addressed the question of whether fish feel pain. Some neurologists believe that the sensation of pain is associated with myelinated c-fibers in the brain, of which fish have comparatively few. Another argument is that because the underwater domain is subject to reduced temperature variation, fish have no need for pain sensors.
“One idea that I’ve played with is that the lack of really feeling gravity underwater means that there is a lot less pressure on their joints, reducing the need for pain sensors there,” explained Prof. Colin Allen, PhD, professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh.
“But it’s a fish-eat-fish world, and the same basic sorts of emotional mechanisms, like fear, that humans experience, have to be as functionally advantageous to fish as they are in a number of creatures above water,” added Allen, who gave a presentation entitled, ‘On the Possible Realizers of Pain in Fish,’ at the conference on November 17. (4)
In addition to the debate over whether fish feel pain, the conference also involved a discussion of theories of consciousness from both philosophical and neurological perspectives. Among them, for example, is the ‘global workspace’ theory, which posits that consciousness in humans is actually composed of several cognitive activities and functions (e.g., memory, imagination, language, and mathematic and spatial analysis).
These several activities are conducted on data initially gathered through the senses, the theory holds, which is then available in a common workspace for all of the various components to work on simultaneously.
But according to this theory, all of the various cognitive capabilities are conducted by individual sub-organs or neural structures, which are centered in different parts of the brain, not all of which may be found in the brains of all creatures. (5)
The conference also included a presentation by Prof. Peter Singer, author of the seminal work Animal Liberation (1975), which is famous for the argument that it is the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, that ought to help us understand a creature’s rights.
The Unfortunate Price of Cognitive Cognition Research as Currently Conducted
The work of researchers indicates that it is often possible to conduct comparative cognition research without vivisection or the killing of the animals.
“For example, Prof. Jonathon Crystal, PhD and his colleagues at Indiana University are always interested in what we mean by episodic memory, as well as metacognition (that is, the awareness of your own cognition),” said Allen, pointing to a recent article by those researchers (6) describing a study in which rats were tested with food holes covered by scented opaque lids.
The study (which was not presented at the Animal Consciousness conference in New York) indicated that “rats remember at least 32 items in context, the episodic memory of a rat can withstand at least 15 unpredictable transitions between contexts, and item-in-context memory persists for at least 45 minutes,” according to the paper by Crystal and colleagues.
“That study was all done on the behavioral level, and there was no need to kill any rats,” noted Allen.
“A rat’s lifespan is only two years,” noted Prof. Olga Lazareva, PhD, the president of the Comparative Cognition Society (who also did not present at the Animal Consciousness conference in New York). “And if at the end of the second year the rat is very old or ill, they might be sacrificed. A lot of us reuse the animals for a long time, because it takes a while to train the animal to work with our apparatus, not to mention that buying animals costs money.”
In fact, comparative cognition research involves the exploitation of large numbers of animals, according to abstracts from past meetings of the Society. (7)
“The work being done by federal agencies like ICCVAM and NICEATM is really exciting and it’s good that they are able to do toxicity tests in cell culture instead of with animals, but the kind of research we are doing requires an entire organism, because we can’t really test consciousness or episodic memory in cell culture,” added Lazareva,
associate professor of psychology at Drake University in Des Moines.
“As you move into the medical domain, as researchers work with rats bred or manipulated to show Alzheimer’s Disease symptoms, naturally one gets interested in what the brains of the animals look like after treatment, and it’s hard to answer all the questions without sacrificing the rat,” added Allen of the University of Pittsburgh.
Notwithstanding biological differences, applied neurological research which is conducted on animals necessarily implies that animals have consciousnesses like humans.
“Neuroscience wants to make the argument that animals can be useful to help us understand human conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease,” explained Allen. “But it’s fair to say that this is a sword that cuts both ways. It’s difficult to maintain, on the one hand, that animal models are strongly relevant to human psychological issues, and on the other hand to claim that animals lack the important aspects of human cognition.
“So the effect of animal cognition research is to create a narrowing of the gap, thus closing the distance between humans and animals in both directions,” he added.
Notes
which amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), 15 U.S.C. §2601 et seq., to
allow that some chemical safety studies can be conducted without animal testing.
4 https://wp.nyu.edu/consciousness/animal-consciousness/#program
5 See, for example, Block, N. (2009). Comparing the major theories of consciousness. In Gazzaniga M, Bizzi E., Chalupa L, et al. The cognitive neurosciences (pp. 1111-1122). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
6 Panoz-Brown D, Corbin H, Dalecki S, et al. “Rats Remember Items in Context Using Episodic Memory,” 2826 Current Biology 26, 2821–2826, October 24, 2016.
7 Abstracts from the Fall 2008 meeting of the Society, in Chicago, described 11 studies using pigeons, 9 studies using various species of primates, 4 using rats, 2 using chickadees, and 2 using dogs (including one study in the domestic dog). The abstracts also described 6 studies in humans, including 1 in four-year-old children. Only 1 study involved a “virtual forager.”
