Matan Shelomi won a Shorty Award for answering this question, "If you injure a bug, should you kill it of let it live?" He wrote:
Looks like the philosophers and theists have made their cases. As far as entomologists are concerned, insects do not have pain receptors the way vertebrates do. They don't feel ‘pain,’ but may feel irritation and probably can sense if they are damaged. Even so, they certainly cannot suffer because they don't have emotions. If you heavily injure an insect, it will most likely die soon: either immediately because it will be unable to escape a predator, or slowly from infection or starvation. Ultimately this crippling will be more of an inconvenience to the insect than a tortuous existence, so it has no ‘misery’ to be put out of but also no real purpose anymore. If it can't breed anymore, it has no reason to live.
In other words, I have not answered your question because, as far as the science is concerned, neither the insect nor the world will really care either way. Personally, though, I'd avoid doing more damage than you've already done. 1) Maybe the insect will recover, depending on how damaged it is. 2) Some faiths do forbid taking animal lives, so why go out of your way to kill? 3) You'll stain your shoe.
I did not injure the Lancet Clubtail, but I sure felt as if I had -- watching the danse macabre with fascination and disgust, leering, really, like a sociopatch at a snuff film. Perhaps "neither the insect nor the world will really care," but I did. What must it be like to be injected with paralyzing venom, liquefied, and then sucked? Merely an "irritation"?
I shivered at the sucking muck staining my shoes and moved away from the living and dead.
2 comments:
Does a mother spider care less about the health of her brood than you or I just because she's using a couple of dozen brain cells instead of a million? We all want to survive (until it's over), we all avoid injury if we can, most of the planet's babies are cute to our eyes. Why do we think these universally observed traits are so different... Unless its just a matter of how many brain cells we have at our disposal? That's probably the only difference and it's not much of one.
Does a mother spider care less about the health of her brood than you or I just because she's using a couple of dozen brain cells instead of a million? We all want to survive (until it's over), we all avoid injury if we can, most of the planet's babies are cute to our eyes. Why do we think these universally observed traits are so different... Unless its just a matter of how many brain cells we have at our disposal? That's probably the only difference and it's not much of one.
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