A thought for all things alive.

[Lord Percy]

3am here so please make allowance for the random banter I'm about to spew.

I just caught a mosquito between my first two fingers, chopstick style, as if I were the karate kid. It fell to the floor, and there was a little black outline of a mosquito shape on my index finger. Anyway it's not dead. I just crippled its wings and a couple of its legs so it can't go anywhere. It's totally motionless, but when I gently pick it up, it starts moving its legs and wobbling fruitlessly.

So now it's just there, immobile and mortally wounded.

What's it thinking? Clearly has less sentience than a human, but it still has sensory inputs, including eyes of some sort, and will have that urge to survive, as all animals do.

It will die tonight. I just wonder what it will feel as it drifts out of existence.

[.....]

Finish the bugger off then worry about it.

[alexknight200...]

Its most probably thinking that this is what it is like to be squashed between two great big artic lorries??

Hope this helps.
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Current stable: Yamaha XVS 650 1996 - Honda Super Magna VF750 1988.

[The Shaggy D.A.]

Mosquitoes kill more humans than any other animal. Death is too good for them.
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[Flip]

[Sako]

I used to feel like that when I watched my victims take their last breath, my hands tight around their throats, don't know what they were thinking, but I'd usually get a hard-on.

[Ariel Badger]

SMIDSY?
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Bikers make great organ donors, get 115 on your licence today.

[Howling TerrorOutOfOffice]

[andys675]

fly, eat, fuck, repeat
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Some people feel the rain, others just get wet.

[hellkat]

Its thinking: Fuckin twat, if he can't kill me in one go, he should still be doing "Wax On Wax Off"
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Not nearly as interesting in real life.

[Derivative]

I don't think insects are sentient. So, nothing.

I've had this argument a few times, actually. Pain in animals.

If you hurt a dog then it will wince. It'll try to get away. So there is a reflexive reaction. But unless it consciously feels the pain there exists no suffering.

I think most would agree that dogs clearly do feel pain. They're intelligent animals.

But does a rabbit? A hamster? A hummingbird? A bumblebee?

Somewhere along the line there's a transition - the sentient knowledge of pain ('feeling' pain) disappears and only the reflexive action remains.

And it's very difficult to draw the line and say 'right, these animals do feel pain, these animals don't'. There are legal boundaries in the UK pertaining to this and it's difficult to really say how accurate they are.

[angryjonny]

[covent.gardens]

I saw a beetle the other day that was on its back. I kept righting him and he would immediately flip on his back again. He had some bad legs on one side but he wasn't clever enough to think "Some of my legs are fucked up on one side. If I walk slowly I'll be able to move, but if I try and scuttle away like a mad beetle, I will only flip over again".

Just seemed to know one thing - run.

On the other hand, they can't be that stupid because they must recognise what another beetle looks like to breed, and get food etc. But then again, a plant does those things too, and they're pretty stupid.

So I dunno.

Ps. I mercy killed the beetle.

[Skudd]

[angryjonny]

Flies keep flying at the window. For hours, if you let them. There's no intelligence in there.

[Skudd]

[Sako]

[GhostRider]

[GhostRider]

[Lord Percy]

I was hoping the thread would take a more philosophical line of thought.

Regarding the concept of suffering - Interesting and true .

I agree with Derivative on the argument of how to define it - at what point does it go from stressful pain that imprints on the brain and has a lasting psychological effect, to the opposite end where the pain is just a cognitive response that's immediately forgotten once the moment has passed.

However I also agree with ghostrider that a lot can be considered as suffering, it just depends on definition and opinion. Not really connected, but leading on from the point that a fly may know a window if it has the time to learn; Fully grown elephants can be tethered to a single short stake in the ground and they won't try to escape because they think they can't, as they've been held that way since they were babies. Conditioning of the mind - if somebody has to endure a very painful event, they may be traumatised for some time, but if a human is subjected to that same event every day from the moment they're born, the 'injury' sensation may still be the same but it won't trauma them as they're conditioned to the process. So who does it hurt more?

I remember on the last post wins thread, someone put up a vid of a snapping turtle pulling a live mouse totally in half, which then wriggled free and tried to swim to the surface with it's guts trailing out behind from it's chest cavity. It was horrific, but I concluded it was more painful for the observer than it was for the mouse, because we perceived the event with our minds in full trauma mode, rather than having lived it in reality. It probably wasn't painful because of the adrenaline and quickness of the moment. And furthermore, if the mouse were suddenly knocked out and then stitched back together and woke up in a month fully healed, how would its mind interpret the suffering? Just a vague, blurred memory?

And what of a human who undergoes major surgery with a general anaesthetic so they're asleep for the whole thing? It's just as much of a major physical trauma, but they don't experience it.

If you look at a bad injury through reverse binoculars, the sensation of pain reduces because the injury looks smaller.

So is pain real, or is it the sum of our emotional perception of the event?

As far as the mosquito goes, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have the memory system humans have, otherwise in the 30 million year existence of its species they'd have formed mini civilisations by now, but they haven't, so their nervous system doesn't go any further than dealing with raw short-term inputs and outputs.

Anyway I think I used a bad word in the OP. When I said, "What does it feel?", I didn't really mean its pain or emotions, I just meant its senses. In its last moments, did the mosquito's life just fade to black?

What are the final sensations of a non-sentient being as it shuts down?

[trevor saxe-coburg-gotha]

[Lord Percy]

[trevor saxe-coburg-gotha]

Nurse - take this one back to the day-room please! Oh and change his catheter - I think his toxins have built up again.
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"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."

Mobylette Type 50 ---> Raleigh Grifter ---> Neval Minsk 125

[Derivative]

[Hetzer]

It's my belief that non-sapient creatures are unable to 'suffer'. Suffering requires the ability to self-reflect and know the pain both internally and externally.

No dog or cat I've ever seen or heard of has lamented the loss of a limb, they go on with their lives as if completely unaware of the loss. A human would be traumatised for life, to some greater or lesser degree (mild regret to full-on woe).
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"There's the horizon! Ride hard, ride fast and cut down all who stand in your way!"