Are there any experiments offering sedatives to farmed or injured animals?
A friend mentioned to me experiments documented in Compassion, by the Pound in which farmed chickens (I think broilers?) prefer food with pain killers to food without pain killers. I thought this was super interesting as it provides more direct evidence about the subjective pain experienced by chickens than merely behavioural experiments, via a a plausible biological mechanism for detecting pain. This seems useful for identifying animals that experience pain.
Identifying some animals that experience pain seems useful. Ideally we would be able to measure pain in a way that lets us compare the effects of potentially welfare-improving interventions. It might be particularly useful to identify animals whose pain is so bad they’d rather be unconscious, suggesting their lives (at least in some moments) are worse than non-existence. I wonder if similar experiments with sedatives could provide information about whether animals prefer to be conscious or not. For example, if injured chickens consistently chose to be sedated, this would provide moderate evidence that their lives are worse than non-existence. (Conversely, failure to prefer sedatives to normal food or pain killers seems weaker evidence against this, but still informative.)
Invertebrate sentience table (introduced here) has “Self-administers analgesics” as one of the features potentially indicative of phenomenal consciousness. But it’s only filled for honey bees, chickens, and humans. I agree that more such experiments would be useful. It’s more directly tied to what we care about (qualia) than most experiments.
I think that animals might not eat painkillers until they are unconscious out of their survival instinct. There are substances that act as painkillers in nature, and the trait “eat it until you’re unconscious” would be selected against by natural selection. But if they would eat it until unconscious, that would provide good evidence that their lives are worse than non-existence.
Are there any experiments offering sedatives to farmed or injured animals?
A friend mentioned to me experiments documented in Compassion, by the Pound in which farmed chickens (I think broilers?) prefer food with pain killers to food without pain killers. I thought this was super interesting as it provides more direct evidence about the subjective pain experienced by chickens than merely behavioural experiments, via a a plausible biological mechanism for detecting pain. This seems useful for identifying animals that experience pain.
Identifying some animals that experience pain seems useful. Ideally we would be able to measure pain in a way that lets us compare the effects of potentially welfare-improving interventions. It might be particularly useful to identify animals whose pain is so bad they’d rather be unconscious, suggesting their lives (at least in some moments) are worse than non-existence. I wonder if similar experiments with sedatives could provide information about whether animals prefer to be conscious or not. For example, if injured chickens consistently chose to be sedated, this would provide moderate evidence that their lives are worse than non-existence. (Conversely, failure to prefer sedatives to normal food or pain killers seems weaker evidence against this, but still informative.)
Invertebrate sentience table (introduced here) has “Self-administers analgesics” as one of the features potentially indicative of phenomenal consciousness. But it’s only filled for honey bees, chickens, and humans. I agree that more such experiments would be useful. It’s more directly tied to what we care about (qualia) than most experiments.
I think that animals might not eat painkillers until they are unconscious out of their survival instinct. There are substances that act as painkillers in nature, and the trait “eat it until you’re unconscious” would be selected against by natural selection. But if they would eat it until unconscious, that would provide good evidence that their lives are worse than non-existence.
Interesting – thanks for sharing. Yes, agreed on all of this