WHAT IS PAIN?

Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Pain is not well understood in humans or other animals. Pain is complex and cannot be measured directly. Pain is very subjective. Individual animals experience pain differently. It is difficult for humans to identify, classify and quantify pain in animals, and this is further complicated because animals can not communicate verbally with us. Yet the anatomic and chemical pathways of pain and its perception are similar in all animals. Therefore we approach the issue of pain with the premise that conditions that are painful to humans are also painful to all animals including rodents, rabbits, hedgehogs, sugar gliders, bats, etc.