You Can Hurt an Insect's Feelings

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Insects might be the most disgusting creature Pixar ever made an animated film about but as someone who's left countless mosquito families without their fathers coming back home with a nice serving of type O negative I have to admit: I kinda feel guilty when I read that, unlike the surface of Mars or the insides of Piers Morgan's skull, science would've found signs of intelligence in every little hexapod I have smacked to death.

Thing is, we're not so different, insects and us.

The biggest difference (apart from, y'know, us being bipedal primates and them being fucking disgusting) is the lack of lungs and stomachs—but most of the other stuff you've seen malfunctioning in Grey's Anatomy can be found: hearts, brains, intestines, ovaries, testicles... we have different chassis, but overall the same pieces.

Fair to say: another key difference is the relative power consumption of the brain—while theirs is pretty energy-saving, ours is less efficient than a Toyota Tundra driving up a hill, but hey, it gave us tap water, democracy and Oreo cookies so it evens out.

But why would insects evolve something like emotions?

Developing the capacity to get triggered like a feral Karen in a Walmart seems unnecessary once you're able to survive a nuclear apocalypse and you know what? Something tells me that if dung beetles could have an opinion on their lifestyle, they'd stop rolling balls of shit and convert to veganism until we're forced to change their name to "the beetle that brings its own food at barbecues."

On the other hand: the primary function of emotions is to change our behaviour, based on current circumstances, so we can improve our ability to survive and procreate. And that's a feature anything with a pulse could benefit from.

There's a problem though.

There's no easy way of quantifying or measuring an insect's emotions. It's not like you can just sit a bumblebee in a chaise longue and ask it to complete a Buzzfeed personality test, so scientists had to come up with creative ways of finding true signs of emotions in them—which took a while cause let's be honest, most zoology degrees would rather be looking at panda bears instead of fruit flies, so this is an understudied field.

But they eventually did it: in one experiment, bumblebees showed clear signs of "pessimistic bias" (which is when we expect things to go wrong for us) after they were "shook vigorously," compared to the bumblebees that weren't shook at all. I infer no bumblebees were physically hurt during this experiment, but most of them would probably like to speak to the manager.

Now we know insects can experience a remarkable range of emotions.

They can get frightened and delighted, they respond to pain and deal with trauma—hell they have more emotional range than Kristen Stewart's acting face, and that's saying something considering the last time you saw a spider you tried to squash it instead of letting it crush in your couch like you would with Kristen herself.

Jump to this conclusion: for some reason panpsychism—the idea that all matter is conscious—is catching up and gaining traction, which begs the question, why can we say that forks might be sentient but we never think of insects as sensitive creatures?

And if they're really sensitive creatures, should we treat them any differently?

I mean, insects are already killed in the quadrillions (a number so big it doesn't fit in your iPhone calculator) but ever since climate change has threatened the Earth's surface to end up looking like dry elbow skin, some people have insisted that insect farms are part of the solution—but are they? You'd have to kill nearly one million individual grasshoppers to get the volume of meat of a single cow, never mind the fact that no one wants to eat anything with more than 4 legs anyway.

Hard to argue with this: we've done it with octopuses, lobsters and crabs; they're considered sentient creatures in the UK already. It may be a matter of time we pull a similarly compassionate move for our little hexapod friends, cause if we can learn anything from the dung beetle is that they have enough bullshit to deal with already.

So, technically...

You can hurt an insect's feelings. It might be hard to empathise with someone whose cuteness level is several orders of magnitude below a golden retriever puppy, but it’s true: insects experience feelings, and the more creatively scientists go about measuring these feelings, the more we find out about them—so who knows, maybe in the future we’ll have to exercise some compassion and tenderness towards nature’s vilest creation. I think I’m gonna need a dozen more of those Pixar movies though.