no pain no gain! wrote:
Presumably, but I would argue that the sort of pain felt by animals is qualitatively different, and of a lesser magnitude than the pain felt by humans. This is because a creature incapable of self-reflection or conscious thought has no way of anticipating the pain, or of recognizing the implications of the pain. The pain is unaccompanied by human emotions like fear, humiliation, despair, etc. There is no thought process to the effect of "Woe is me, I am currently experiencing unprecedented agony and my existence is about to end!"
They won't have the same kind of concept of it but they definitely have fear (and live with it a lot of the time). Look at a deer and how cautious they are or even a hamster, which won't walk across the middle of a room but is jumpy and sticks to the edges, cautiously creeping around.
We don't have a 100% foolproof way of telling how much pain they experience. A lot of it is guesswork. But yes they don't have the same cognitive abilities as a human (although that's our biased POV). If we are just talking about physical pain with no emotional component (which isn't all of pain) then they could experience that part in similar ways - I think so, anyway.
