Pain in Context: Indicators and Expressions of Animal Pain

This chapter aims to contribute to the endeavour of investigating nonhuman animals as experiencing subjects in their own right with their own species-specific histories. Our focus is on the examination of pain experience in animals. We argue that there is need for more research in which pain experience in animals is accounted for in species-specific terms. Making use of empirical studies in the fields of neurobiology, evolutionary-developmental biology, comparative psychology, and cognitive ethology, we try to offer a phenomenological analysis of indications and expressions of pain experience in animals. We attempt to show how different animals are capable of indicating and expressing specific and unique experiences of pain in terms of their particular species, evolution, and places of living in human and natural contexts.