Animals suffer too — A response to akhtar’s “animal pain and welfare: Can pain sometimes be worse for them than for us?”

In her chapter, Akhtar (2011) suggests that animals experience worse physical pain than humans because animals are not endowed with self-consciousness or with consciousness of the passage of time. In this article, I dispute this idea. Instead, I develop a fear/pain criterion of rational behavior that reveals that rats do behave rationally whereas humans in many cases do not. A human applies his or her higher intellectual capability such that at times it increases suffering and at times it decreases suffering.