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A Review BBC Focus, May 2006 All animals feel pain, in the sense that their nervous system reacts to harmful stimuli, but the question of whether they experience this sensation as suffering has been vigorously debated since Aristotle. By contrast, the scientific community has shown mute indifference as to whether animals experience pleasure. Balcombe’s assertion is that they most certainly do and he backs this up with a bewildering array of anecdotes and examples of animals behaving in ways that do not obviously contribute directly to their survival. The trouble with Balcombe’s thesis is that it must tread a tightrope between either defining animal pleasure in such a way that its existence is trivially self-evident or else leaving it completely unknowable. When a cat purrs as you stroke it, there can be no doubt that it is feeling pleasure, but who can say what goes through the ‘mind’ of a thirsty tiger swallowtail butterfly as it drinks? Balcombe is so desperate to see playfulness and joy in the everyday behaviour of animals that he frequently resorts to anthropomorphic assumptions and rhetorical questions that do little to further the argument. Luis Villazon is the author of ‘How cows reach the ground.’ May 8, 2006
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