Research that counters the hypothesis

Okay, I know I said I was going to post this on Monday, but that was a lie. Better late than never! (Note: this post is not late in the sense that points should be deducted; in fact, it is technically quite early.) In my last post, I described a study led by Dr. Lynne Sneddon from The Roslin Institute that appeared to give conclusive evidence of the presence of pain in fish. However, with every new piece of evidence, Dr. James L. Rose from the University of Wyoming seems determined to try and refute it. In his critique of the study by Sneddon et al., Rose lists several reasons why he thinks the study should not be considered particularly valid evidence for pain in fish.

For one thing, Rose accuses Sneddon et al. of assuming that "any behavior that is a reflex would be evidence of nociception but any behavior more complex than a reflex would be evidence of
pain." He invalidates this assumption by pointing to certain instances where humans themselves make certain complex, non-reflexive responses to harmful stimuli without being conscious (and therefore, not feeling pain)—for example, humans with "extensive damage" of the cerebral hemispheres.

Rose goes on to provide evidence (the lack of a neocortex) that fish do not have the capacity for pain, and perhaps not even the capacity for consciousness. "The burden of proof," he says, lies with Sneddon et al. to show that trout have the biological capacity to feel pain. The so-called "conclusive evidence" suggested by Sneddon, Rose claims, arose "only by citing previous studies that also used invalid criteria for pain, such as avoidance learning, which actually occurs unconsciously." He also accuses Sneddon of anthropomorphism.

Rose also provides reasons for why the behavioral results allegedly showing evidence of pain were "misinterpreted"—vast differences in the fish neurology compared to mammal neurology, as well alternative, apparently more plausible explanations for the "pained" fishes' behaviors.

This is not the only time Dr. Rose has criticized studies of fish pain. In fact, in one of his articles, Rose et al. commented on more than a dozen studies (including some by Sneddon, and another significant study by Nordgreen et al. that studied the reactions of fish to high heat), and "refuted" all of their reasonings that led to the conclusions that fish feel pain, through some of his logic stated above. Sneddon responded to Rose (rather acrimoniously, in fact) by criticizing him for his lack of a "track record" in animal neurology, for inserting his own "personal opinion[s]" into his work, and for implying that one can disprove but not prove the existence of pain in fish. Sneddon responds to Rose's anthropomorphism remark by accusing Rose himself of anthropomorphism by assuming that fish's bodies work the same ways humans' do. In his article "The Welfare of Fish," Professor George Iwama of Acadia University, while agreeing with many of Rose's points, conquers with Sneddon that "the basis for our respectful treatment" of fish should not rely "upon the outcome that fish...experience pain as we do."

Dr. Rose makes many good points. However, I would agree with Sneddon that he seems to be taking the "burden of proof" concept too far. Although I might agree with him that we cannot conclusively say that fish feel pain (like Sneddon seems to say), I don't agree that every pro-fish-pain conclusion by every study is automatically invalid. These studies aren't proof of fish pain, and maybe not even evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but they can certainly still be considered evidence. Rose can go ahead and invalidate some of the conclusions certain researchers make, but he shouldn't discredit the research entirely. This is surely a topic worthy of further study.

Research that supports the hypothesis

All right, so this blog post is kind of a continuation of the previous one. I'll follow up on this one with another post on Monday, probably. Today's post will summarize and discuss some of the research that's been done in favor of the fish pain hypothesis, and Monday's will discuss some of the rebuttals to this research.

The rainbow trout, the species the 2003 Sneddon et al. study tested for fish pain.
(Image taken from ACNL Wikia)

I mentioned earlier that the name "Lynne Sneddon" kept coming up in my research. This is because her research team performed one of the most notable experiments in the history of the fish pain debate. In 2003, Sneddon et al. proved for the first time that fish have nociceptors—nerve cells that respond to tissue-damaging stimuli. However, since pain must include an "unpleasant...emotional experience" (as defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain), the presence of nociceptors alone does not prove that fish feel true pain. So Sneddon et al. continued testing, observing trout behavior after being subjected to harmful stimuli. The fish demonstrated "rocking" motions, similar to the motions certain mammals perform while in pain. Fish would also rub the negatively affected body areas onto solid surfaces, in motions that, according to Sneddon, "[did] not appear to be reflex responses." Put together, this research was said to be the "first conclusive evidence" of pain perception in fish.

All right, so here are some thoughts. As far as I can tell, even Sneddon's harshest critics don't seem to be contesting the fact that her discovery of fish nociceptors was genuine. However, as I mentioned earlier, simply recognizing negative stimuli and actually feeling pain are two different things. Sneddon claims that the observation of behavior in affected fishes is "conclusive" evidence that they are "pained," though I'm not sure I can say that so confidently. (Though of course, I am not the scientist.) Sneddon says that the behavior did not appear to be reflex responses, but does not provide anything with which to back up the claim. Furthermore, Sneddon's critic, Dr. James D. Rose, came up with seemingly valid reasons to doubt Sneddon's claim (reasons which I will elaborate on in my next blog post). This doesn't mean we should discredit this study entirely—the discovery of nociceptors is undoubtedly significant to the research question, and the behavior studied does provide evidence of pain in fish, if not absolute proof.

Opposing viewpoints

Dr. Lynne Sneddon seems to support fish welfare without question.
(Photo taken from Twitter)

Hey all. I finished the first draft of my Literature Review Assignment. Everything seems to be running smoothly. Pain in fish is definitely my research topic now—I won't be changing it again, I promise. The only concern I have at this point is that I have no idea how I'm going to be making a final argument when 1.) I'm not a scientist, and I'm basing my argument from science and 2.) there are as many scientific articles in support of the theory as there are against it.

One weird thing about that second point, though: many different articles that I've compiled are contributed on by the same people—Drs. Lynne Sneddon and James D. Rose are two very common names in this topic that argue for and against the fish pain theory, respectively. If you search "fish pain" in Google Scholar, you'll find that it's nearly impossible to find a scholarly article that doesn't at least reference the work of one of these two researchers.

I'm beginning to wonder if I might be getting a bit of a skewed view. Probably not too skewed, since all the scholarly articles are peer-reviewed. But it's still worth considering. For example, Lynne Sneddon's work is geared less toward the simple pursuit of knowledge and more toward animal welfare. That doesn't mean her data isn't reliable or that her logic isn't sound, but it could mean she might leave out possible deductions that could oppose her theory.

I'll give examples of some of the research I've found soon—hopefully before Monday night this time.

This is the last time, I promise

Well, it turns out that I need to pick a research question more precise than simply "How intelligent are animals?", primarily because it would be impossible to do a comprehensive analysis on the neurologies of every species in the animal kingdom. Just because one non-human animal displays sentience doesn't mean all of them do. So, after some pondering and some Wikipedia browsing, I decided on...

BostInno

Elephants!

Numerous studies show that elephants are among the most intelligent species on the planet. They pass the mirror test, a test for self-awareness that is also believed to correlate with empathy. They display altruistic behavior for other elephants (and sometimes humans as well). They appear to mourn their dead and even perform death rituals. There is lots of scholarly research on the topic. Seemingly, it is the perfect research question: "Do elephants have emotions?"

...Until I realized midway through my preliminary research that almost nobody disagreed with the fact that elephants had emotions. This surprised me greatly—in all my other studies, there were plenty who claimed that no animal could feel true, human-like emotions, and that those who claimed otherwise were guilty of anthropomorphism. However, I could not find a single instance of any expert singling out elephants as not having human-like emotions. That meant that I had nothing to argue against—I would be writing nothing more than an "info dump".

So, I once again changed my topic, this time to...

Graham Owen

Fish!

I'm not doing a broad "fish intelligence" or "fish emotions" paper; instead, I'll be writing about the possibility that fish feel pain. This is an important topic because it, more than anything, affects how humans interact with fish—most prominently, the way we fish. If impaling fish in the mouth and pulling them out of the water to suffocate becomes known to actually cause them pain, angling would definitely become a major moral problem. I will not be asking "Should angling be outlawed?" or making something similar my research question; my question will simply be "Do fish feel pain?" (From my research so far, it seems I can pretty much generalize this question across all fish species.) However, I will certainly mention the moral issues in the paper.

A good thing about this research is that it's very divisive—neurological experts disagree pretty evenly. I should note that unlike most of my previous research topic ideas, I have no initial opinion on the issue at the start—I don't know which side I'll ultimately argue for. This blog post is getting pretty long for me to go any further, but I'll discuss some of my findings in future blog posts.

Anthropomorphism

All right, so I'm studying animal intelligence; that's pretty much set in stone. "Animal intelligence" is a pretty broad topic by itself—probably too broad for this type of research paper—but also, I don't want to pick a topic so specific that it's not researchable. I'm basically just getting started, so we'll see how it goes.

Many biologists warn about the "dangers" of anthropomorphism—which, in a scientific context, is the tendency to assume that animals have similar emotions and motivations to what humans do, which, in many (if not most) cases, is a fallacy. However, some scientists see less of a problem with interpreting animal behavior in this way: in If Your Cat Could Talk, veterinarian Bruce Fogle argues that "both humans and cats have identical neurochemicals and regions in the brain responsible for emotion;" therefore, "it is not anthropomorphic to credit cats with emotions such as jealousy." Furthermore, in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin dismisses this "anthropocentrism" mindset with the assertion that the differences between animals and humans are "only in degree and not in kind."

I certainly don't know anything about the similarities between human neurochemicals and animal neurochemicals, and I'll definitely need to find more perspectives on this issue before I can take any sort of side in it.

That's all I've got for now. I'll record some possible research subtopics in the coming week.

I changed my mind again

All right, I'm kind of flip-flopping here. I'm back to my original "animal cognition" topic.

It's worth noting that a lot of these "ideas" I've been reporting on my blog posts are not mine, but are, in fact, the professor's. When I initially proposed the animal cognition topic, he made me aware that I phrased it too broadly and made the research look as though it would have been too reliant on philosophy. So, I switched to an "easy" topic (animal testing). But then, after my conference with her, she suggested I return to my original topic, with a few revisions.

I may still frame my argument within the context of animal testing, but it will probably be a smaller subsection of the research paper instead of the main argument. Previously, I was going to argue something along the lines of "If animals have cognition to this degree, then we should be treating them in this way..." but now I will be doing a more straightforward research paper on animal cognition and consciousness in general. Now that I think about it, a good spot to mention animal testing might be where I'll mention the pain experience in animals.

I've got my second research proposal due this Thursday, and next week is spring break. I'm pretty sure (or at least, I hope) that I'm not going to have a whole lot of homework over break, so this should give me plenty of time to do lots and lots of research. Hopefully I can work up the willpower to actually be productive over break.

All right, research time. Below, I'll be posting links to articles I find on the subject of animal testing, both scholarly and non-scholarly, accompanied by a short description, my feelings about the material, and how I may incorporate the article in my paper. By the time I'm done researching, I hope to have dug around enough to come up with a more specific topic.

• As before, Wikipedia is a starting point. The lead section on the "Animal testing" article neatly summarizes everything that comes after it and covers a lot of different points related to animal testing, including a few I hadn't considered. The article details some arguments for and against animal testing, but from an objective, neutral viewpoint. The article discusses the different applications of animal testing, the sources of animals used for testing, the euthanasia of lab animals, different ethical viewpoints, and general statistics. Although I may use some of the references the Wikipedia article provides, I will also be using Wikipedia in the early stages of my planning to get starting ideas of the different points to cover.
• Like Wikipedia, ProCon.org is another great place to get ideas about debatable topics. It also includes dozens of reliable sources, some of them scholarly, which I might make use of in my research paper. ProCon.org is a reputable non-profit organization that discusses common debates in today's society, and lists summaries of different arguments in a pro-con format. Its entry for "Animal Testing" includes 13–14 arguments on each side. Some of them are obvious and well-known (e.g., "Animal testing is cruel"), but others bring up things I never would have thought up myself (e.g., "Most experiments involving animals are flawed, wasting the lives of the animal subjects").
• When these two websites are insufficient, Google Scholar and the UB Libraries' Catalog will be my friends. I think I have a good understanding of the catalog from the in-class tutorial and from the Library Skills Workbook, and I've used Google Scholar on research papers before, and it's always worked.

At the moment, I'll assume I'll be doing a general research paper about animal testing. If, during my research, I feel like my topic could be narrower, I will make it so, but I think I'm good for now.

Well, friends, completely disregard my previous blog post! Animal consciousness/pain/emotion is not, in fact, a workable topic. Excessive writing about philosophy would be involved, so it's a good thing I'm dropping this topic because for one thing, it's very difficult to write a research paper about philosophy, and second, philosophy can get really boring. My intent was to focus on scientific research and base my arguments off of that, but I did not realize what I was getting myself into. So, I'm back to hunting for topics.

Part of the reason I wanted to do a "weird" topic like animal consciousness was because I wanted to avoid writing a general paper about animal testing, especially since more than half the class is writing about something related to that topic. I am almost positive that animal testing will be a major component of the topic I choose—what better topic for making an argument involving animals and technology? There are solid arguments on both sides, plenty of existing research available, and I can make clear arguments based off of hard facts. However, I will try to narrow my studies to a specific field within animal testing.

I haven't done any real research in this yet (I've only just discarded my old topic), so I can't say what the research process will be like. If I find an abundance of articles in a narrow field of animal testing—say, cosmetics testing, or drug testing—then perhaps I could narrow my topic there. Otherwise, I should attempt to make a conclusion with more depth than "therefore, animal testing is okay!" or "it's bad!" I will make a more qualified argument, such as "Animal testing can be acceptable, provided that..." or perhaps a conclusion from a different perspective, such as "This organization is not doing enough to stop the cruelty going on in..."

I know I should have a definite topic by now, but I want to discuss my ideas on Tuesday before I make anything official (again). I'll be doing plenty of preliminary research this week, so stay tuned.

Well friends, I have a topic! "Animal consciousness" is my topic in broad terms, but I will mainly discuss it within the context of animal rights, ethics, and animal testing. I'll present scientific evidence and make an argument—not a concrete decision about whether animals do indeed experience emotion (I'm no scientist), but an argument for how animals should be treated, based on today's knowledge of animal cognition.

How did I come across this topic, you may ask? Wikipedia! It is such a wonderful website. The lead paragraph of the "animal consciousness" article alone supplied me with a lot of scientific, historical, and philosophical knowledge. In addition to the main "animal consciousness" page, there are also full articles on emotion in animals, pain in animals, and the "mirror test" (a supposed test for animal self-awareness), among many others.

Yes, I know that Wikipedia isn't a scholarly source, or even a wholly reliable one. But these Wikipedia articles give me loads of introductory information from which to build off, as well as references and links to more reliable sources. From what I can tell so far, I don't think I'll have much trouble providing basic scientific evidence. But presenting an argument? That remains to be seen. I'll keep y'all posted.

Hello all! I'm Will, and this is the first blog post of many which will deal with the relationship between animals and human technology. First thing's first—I need to decide what, specifically, I'll be researching. An obvious choice would be to research and argue for or against animal testing. If I find enough info about a specialized field of animal testing, I may focus on that.

However, there are plenty of other topics related to both animals and technology—not all of them as controversial as animal testing. The domestication of animals for agricultural use, keeping animals as pets, training them to assist humans in detective work or as a guide dog, the study of animal kinematics for scientific use—the list goes on and on.

I did read a few interesting articles on CNN a couple weeks ago about how there is a campaign to rid New York City of horse-drawn carriage rides, with some declaring it animal abuse. There seemed to be a decent amount of coverage on the subject, but is it enough for a research paper? That remains to be seen.

The most important thing for me is that I pick a topic that's interesting to research. I need to be in this class, and I need to write this long paper and these regular blog posts, so I might as well make it fun somehow. I expect to have a concrete topic down within a few days—stay posted.