Pain and Suffering

I read the chapter on pain and suffering in the book about animals in transition tonight while the kids were playing wii. The game required stomping on this stupid pad. That sound of children stomping on the floor annoys me to no end so I was on the threshold of pain and suffering myself.

What interested me most about the chapter was that some animals if injured appearantly hide their pain if they are in plain view and often will eat and act normal. The author supposed this was because an animal in the wild that didnt hide its pain was more vulnarable to being picked off by a predator.

Also she explained that because the frontal lobes of the brain are not as developed as ours animals may experience pain differently. I think she wrote that about 1949 they experimented with disconecting the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain in human patients experiencing debilitating pain. My understanding is that a labotomy is when they remove the fronal lobe- dont ask what me what a frontal lobe is exactly- but a leucodamy- or something like that - is when they just disconnect them. After the operation the people appeared to return to normal - doing routine activities they used to. Their response when asked about the pain was that they still had the pain but it didn't bother them as much. It wasnt debilitating. The author supposed that they had the pain but thought about it differently. They experienced the pain but not the suffering. She thought animals could probobly be similar. In fact she wrote that to an animal fear was probobly worse than pain. She failed to mention the wii game.

To think about my pain differently, I chose to be happy I have healthy rambunctious kids who are able to enjoy physical activity and bounce off the walls and pound on the floor like so many jackhammers. So I have the pain of the wii but not the suffering because I've chosen to look at it differently and also because they are now in bed.