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-Further to my above point, I believe without a sense of identity or introspective self-awareness, pain is not experienced in a similar way to how humans, or say gods experience it. I think for many animals that lack those traits, pain is essentially just a signal. I think (perhaps weak) evidence in support of that point is the occurrence of PTSD like symptoms in different animals. Humans and dogs, who both possess levels of self-awareness, suffer PTSD like symptoms as a result of trauma (with dogs, it can be being reclusive, afraid, overly aggressive, and like people they need guidance and help to deal with their trauma and become healthy again). At the other end of the scale, say again with roundworms, it's the opposite. If a roundworm gets burned for example, it's just going to retreat and go on with it's life, no worse for wear. It's no worse for wear because it doesn't have the cognitive capacity to be worse for wear psychologically. And while many vegans will make an argument that is some form of "we don't know what it's like to be a roundworm", I believe we have a sufficiently advanced understanding of animal brains (certainly we do for the roundworm, which has a complete connectome and whose brain has been successfully emulated as a program running on a lego robot) that we can rule out the roundworm being capable of anything remotely close to PTSD.