Abstract

Judgements about pain and suffering in animals are required by the law of many countries and by many professional guidelines. Nevertheless, such assessments raise many problems, even in humans. Furthermore, an appeal to continuities between humans and other animals is clouded when, as is still the case, both the evolution and the function of a subjective sense of pain are obscure. Despite these difficulties, the criteria that lead to the judgement that a human is in pain can be generalized with substantial measure of agreement to other animals. This generalization is done on the basis of uncovering comparable mechanisms and comparable behaviour; then the whole cluster of features found in the animal is used to make the judgement. The less similar the animal to a human and the less complex it is, the more difficult is the assessment. The fuzziness of the boundary between those animals that are judged to feel pain and those that are not does not invalidate the process of assessment. However, the extent to which an animal is given the benefit of the doubt clearly depends on the empathy a person feels for it as well as the type of ethical concerns that motivate the person.