In article > ,
"Rubystars" > wrote:

> "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

Sorry for being rude, but can we clarify the issue that you want to
discuss with me here. Based on your comments above, there are a dozen or
so routes that I can pursue.

From your final paragraph, I interpret your statements to mean that when
others (in this case animals) are vulnerable harm that you feel an
obligation to protect them. If you've been following my conversation
with Dutch, this can also be argued as the golden rule operationalized
in that humans fear being unable to defend themselves and treat others
(animals in this case) as they would like to be treated.