"Ron" > wrote in message
<snip>
> My experience of psychology offers very differing ideas on pain and
> cognitive aspects of pain. Thanks for the clarification of your point.
<snip>

You're welcome. Although psychological experiments have at times involved
animals, (Pavlov's dogs salivating, pigeons trained to hit a button for a
food reward, etc.) psychology is mainly focused on human beings. To
understand animals it's best to look at what abilities and limitations they
have, what needs they have in life, and what brings the animals optimal
health.

I remember taking a psychology course in which they told us that psychology
teaches that humans have no animal instincts. The example they gave us was
asking whether a human mother had "maternal instincts." The "correct" answer
was no, because supposedly humans don't have instincts at all. I completely
and totally disagree with this. We are animals and we share a lot of
instinctive urges with animals, and many things are driven by animalistic
things rather than a logical thinking mind. For example tests have been done
showing various subconcious things affecting mate selection (one example
being that apparently people pick up information on each other's immune
systems through smell, and this affects how attractive they find a person,
even though they never think about this consciously), and cross cultural
studies showing similarities between different human beings in how they deal
with certain problems, and even similarities in social structure and
behaviors with the other great apes, and to a lesser degree, other primates
and other mammals.

I think that pain is a physical process rather than a psychological
response, although how each human being deals with pain may depend on their
psychology. Some individuals have a higher threshold than others as to what
they, personally, can tolerate. For example, an adult usually doesn't scream
and cry when they get a shot at the doctor's office, and therefore can
tolerate it much better psychologically than a baby or young child, but they
still feel pain. When it comes to animals who can not speak for themselves,
I think it's safest morally to assume that most animals can feel pain and to
avoid causing it if it's at all practical to do so.

-Rubystars