And you may or may not choose to take some comfort in the ongoing argument between Lynn Sneddon and Gary Rose about the capacity for fishes to experience pain. Rose, in my view, makes a compelling argument that they cannot. While it’s true that mice ain’t fish, at the very least, Rose draws the important distinction between nociception and pain and makes the point that while nociceptors are well-conserved and widely expressed among chordates, the same cannot be said for the neural equipment required for the emotional, anticipatory, and self-aware dimensions of pain, and thus its subjective quality may vary at least as much as its neural substrates. How far that argument can be taken with mice, I’ll leave to people who know more about mice brains than I.