Pain

Do animals have rights? Does that mean we should treat animals equal as human beings?

That's a philosophical question I happened to come across during my recent reading.

Every so often in life we get to admit we cause animals pain, for one reason or another. Not many people (me included), on the other hand, would be prepared to stop eating animals because slaughtering animals induces animals pain.

Pain may be pain, Julian Baggini reasons, but it can become more (or less) serious depending on how and when it is felt, by what kind of creature. That is not to say that animal pain is trivial. There is clearly a moral concern when we kill animals, say, for the sake of testing cosmetics. Few things turn the stomach more when reading a passage how people torture dogs and cats for fun. How about chasing or killing a cockroach at your kitchen? Well, yes, being slapped by a slipper is unpleasant and painful, but as soon as it has passed, life of the cockroach goes on - or off, depending how precise we hit the cockroach. The same is not true for humans, as made clear by Baggini, because some more mentally sophisticated animals (like Homo sapiens) can turn their pain into longer-lasting suffering and become haunted by the memory of nasty pain.

That is why we should prioritise reducing human pain over animal pain. That made sense.

Yesterday morning, I taught my students how we inserted a catheter into the tummy of a patient whose kidneys suddenly stopped working. If we didn't make an effort to dialyse him, I told them, he would die shortly. Nonetheless, we had to use a pretty sharp needle to pop open his tummy. That's painful. Indeed, it seems hard to imagine how we can do that without causing suffering. The point of getting my patient sedated was discussed. Some of my students worried about getting the patient into sleep; they would rather suggest a bigger dose of painkiller. But that may not be the whole story of pain management. In other words, pain becomes a less serious problem if it won't be remembered or anticipated over time. That is why sedative, I would argue, serves to make the pain go away.