By: Editor
———-
AgriGyan – Your Partner in Knowledge

Scientists often defined pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Simply defining pain in such a way is not enough to express the real experience felt by the subject who is actually having the pain. The subject is either human or animal. Advantage with human is that he can describe the pain by just saying that it’s paining a person may report pain that cannot be detected by any known physiological measure. However, animals can express the feeling of pain only through their weird and frenzy behavior. However, like infants, animals cannot answer questions about whether they feel pain; thus the defining criterion for pain in humans cannot be applied to them. When animals are in pain they often become offensive and injured the human or animals around them. The psychological condition through which animal is passing is yet unexplained by science but we can estimate the uneasiness through their behavior.

Figure 1: Common practice of transporting poultry in India. We can improve the ways in which these birds can feel comfortable. Like we can use modern transport system in which these birds feel free & comfortable.

Figure 2: We need to work on design and structure of transporting vehicles, cages and other equipments with due importance given to comfortable transporting animals and birds.

.

Some criteria that may indicate the potential of another species to feel pain include:

• Has a suitable nervous system and sensory receptors
• Physiological changes to noxious stimuli
• Displays protective motor reactions that might include reduced use of an affected area such as limping, rubbing, holding or autotomy
• Has opioid receptors and shows reduced responses to noxious stimuli when given analgesics and local anaesthetics
• Shows avoidance learning
• High cognitive ability and sentience

Response to pain is frequently used by trainers to train the pet and domestic animals. The principle behind this is that animals like humans do also have reward and punishment centers in the brain and response accordingly to achieve reward and avoid punishment. These training might have some assertion and reasons for the sake of arguments but in other cases where we can easily avoid such painful and distressful situations, we remain insensitive. For example when broilers are loading into the trucks in early mornings to send the markets, they are treated like non living things and labors are just throwing them into the transport cages. These cages are very small and surly not comfortable. Interestingly eggs are handling with excessive care and there is no need to give reason for such care. It’s really inconvincible as a Human being that we make them suffer without any reason and just due to carelessness. If we look into the nature we see that carnivores eat herbivores because both are tagged in a same thread of food chain. Food chain is a delicate relationship between different organisms on earth. Lion is eating deer only for his survival; he would not exploit them for fun or greed like humans.

Obviously, it is not a matter of debate whether animals feel pain or not. The question is that whether we are sensitive to pain and uneasiness felt by animals or not. Discomfort by any means changes the behavior of animals. As a human we have the responsibility to take care of all the species inhabiting the earth as we are the only species on earth that can save all other lives on this blue planet.

I am not against eating chicken or beef or chevon or mutton because it is a part of food chain and we can’t go against it. I am speaking against our insensitiveness and irresponsibility towards well being of animals and particularly their freedom. We need to be more sensitive and conscientious for animal rights and welfare. Awareness regarding animal welfare is increasing these days and many people and groups are working for animal rights. Five freedoms have already been given for animals which I had learned in National Animal Welfare Institute, Ballabgarh, during my internship program. Dr. Arun Varma, a renowned animal physiologist and former ADG of ICAR had taught me these basic facts. He is working sincerely in this field since long back. On his advice I took Physiology in my masters program at IVRI. The five freedoms, sometimes known as Brambell’s five freedoms, are a compact of rights for animals under human control, including those intended for food or which act as working animals.

The five freedoms as currently expressed are:

1. Freedom from hunger or thirst by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour
2. Freedom from discomfort by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area
3. Freedom from pain, injury or disease by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment
4. Freedom to express normal behaviour by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind
5. Freedom from fear and distress by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering

I don’t think that any animal caretaker (owner word is not used now a days) or farmer need any extra expenses to provide above 5 things. He just needs to organize and systemize the habitat conditions and living environment to provide due comfort zone. There are many companies working in this area which are providing animal welfare products like comfortable transport cages and other equipments which give ease to the animals in farm as well as during transport. These precautions will not only feel us good but also increases our chances of profit because healthy physiology means better production.

Besides social implications this area has also a potent scope for research. We can make stress diagnosis kits through which we can detect the particular molecules called stress markers in the blood or saliva because their presence in blood is hiked during stress. These markers include epinephrine, nor epinephrine, Heat shock proteins and other blood transcriptomic markers. But again, I state that identifying stress is not enough until we take serious steps in handling and care of animals and birds. In the last I would like to say that everybody should be a strict follower of the quote famous by Mr. Salman Khan “Being human”.