Quote of the Day

At first sight, 'suffering' and 'scientific' are not terms that can or should be considered together. When applied to ourselves, 'suffering' refers to the subjective experience of unpleasant emotions such as fear, pain and frustration that are private and known only to the person experiencing them. To use the term in relation to non-human animals, therefore, is to make the assumption that they too have subjective experiences that are private to them and therefore unknowable by us. 'Scientific' on the other hand, means the acquisition of knowledge through the testing of hypotheses using publicly observable events. The problem is that we know so little about human consciousness that we do not know what publicly observable events to look for in ourselves, let alone other species, to ascertain whether they are subjectively experiencing anything like our suffering. The scientific study of animal suffering would, therefore, seem to rest on an inherent contradiction: it requires the testing of the untestable.

- Marian S. Dawkins