Well, yes. Rural kids play with bugs and do all sorts of objectively horrible things to them. Because they are bugs. I am not trying to defend it, but yes, that’s normal.
zzffyfajzkzhnsweqm@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Those criteria seem vague enough one can probably count most plants as capable of pain…
But generally outcome seems obvious and intuitive enough. Would normal person intentionally torture cricket just for the fun of it?
dbtng@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago zzffyfajzkzhnsweqm@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
I agree it is more common than it should be. But to most humans this seems horrible. And it seems horrible because we all assume bugs can feel pain.
It is not that kids treat them like that because they assume bugs do not feel pain. They do it despite that. Kids know this is not the same as cutting grass.
amio@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Plants groom themselves, preferring areas that were damaged? Damn, my local flora is boring as shit.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
No, but they will release chemical signals that attract predators of things that eat plants, while telling other nearby plants to start moving nutrients into their root structures to minimize damage.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Pain has an emotional component though. Without a devoted nervous system, any kind of subjective experience a plant has would be on a very long timescale, (And you’d have the weird situation where it’s mind “grows” as it’s thinking)
For sure, people treat a dog as if it has pain, and lettuce as if it doesn’t.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
How do you measure emotions?
Like, how do I know that you have emotions? If I punch you, how do I know you’ll feel pain? I’m not gonna feel what you feel, I can only observe your response. Stimulus, response.
Same thing with plants. Same thing with dogs.
As to your last point, it wasn’t that long ago that Very Smart People argued dogs don’t feel pain. Of course they obviously did, and of course most every normal person recognized they did…but that wasn’t what we “knew”, as a society. Hell, it wasn’t until like, 50 years ago that we recognized human babies felt pain prior to being able to vocalize an “ow that hurts”.
Perhaps it makes people feel better to know that dogs feel pain and lettuce doesn’t. But that’s almost certainly not a true statement.
Edit: also, how much of your body controls your brain? Like, have you ever considered bending your elbow in the wrong direction? No? Why not? Why is it the wrong direction? It just is, right? That’s how the body works?
zzffyfajzkzhnsweqm@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Why would that be an issue? Are sloths less capable of pain because they are slower?
Why would be an issue with that? Kids brain grows and you have no issue with acknowledging their mind? It is not too hard to imagine?
What a strange assumption on my intentions…
zzffyfajzkzhnsweqm@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
They do groom themselves. Trees grow a tissue around their wound. A chayote bends its vine on response to my touch. Yes they use chemicals and hormones to perform that action, but so do we?
Their nervous system is of course different and slower than ours, but you have no mechanism that would say you or cricket feels pain and my chayote does not. From my point of view you, chayote and crickets might all just be philosophical zombies and just respond to some stimuly as robots.