Quote:
Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
No, but that's the point. They avoid being killed because it is painful and they avoid pain.
|
debatable, i think. would it not be more likely an animal avoids death because of a learned response (usually through observational learning - i.e., peers / caregivers will run from certain other animals), or through classical conditioning or operant conditioning (whereby an animal may not go an sit in a raging fire because the nervous system creates unpleasant sensory feedback when the animal gets too close to something hot and thus learns not to get too close next time, for example)?
I'm not sure an animal is aware that being killed is painful per-se. not unless it has been lucky enough to escape the jaws of it's killer, or drop and rolled when it walked through a fire, to use the previous examples.
it's also true that the animal may learn a fear response when it hears the cries of fellow animals during the killing process, but it may not necessarily understand the pain which its peer is suffering.
as a comparison, humans will let out screams when in extreme pain and extreme terror too (unless they are British, of course!), but they may not always be discernible from one another.