You could also do brain imaging to check for pain responses.
You might not even need to know what normal pain responses in the species look like, because you could just check normally painful stimuli vs control stimuli.
However, knowing what normal pain responses in the species look like would help. Also, across mammals, including humans and raccoons, the substructures responsible for pain (especially the anterior cingulate cortex) seem roughly the same, so I think we’d have a good idea of where to check.
Maybe one risk is that the brain would just adapt and recruit a different subsystem to generate pain, or use the same one in a diffefdnt way. But control stimuli could help you detect that.
Another behavioural indicator would be (learned) avoidance of painful stimuli.
Great thoughts. I will need to think more deeply about how to make this possible cost wise. We need a large sample to find the genes, but the brain imaging might make this challenging.
You could also do brain imaging to check for pain responses.
You might not even need to know what normal pain responses in the species look like, because you could just check normally painful stimuli vs control stimuli.
However, knowing what normal pain responses in the species look like would help. Also, across mammals, including humans and raccoons, the substructures responsible for pain (especially the anterior cingulate cortex) seem roughly the same, so I think we’d have a good idea of where to check.
Maybe one risk is that the brain would just adapt and recruit a different subsystem to generate pain, or use the same one in a diffefdnt way. But control stimuli could help you detect that.
Another behavioural indicator would be (learned) avoidance of painful stimuli.
Great thoughts. I will need to think more deeply about how to make this possible cost wise. We need a large sample to find the genes, but the brain imaging might make this challenging.