Today i thought about lizards.

The reason i thought about them was because Miss A. Tan was upset that someone killed a lizard, and that someone was christian to boot. I told her that we christians don't believe that animals have souls, and that we eat meat anyway, to which she replied that we eat meat for sustenance, whereas the killing of lizards was unnecessary cruelty.

But i thought, the argument that killing for meat is justifiable is iffy. Afterall, how does one define sustenance? Since humans can survive on vegetables alone, is the killing of poultry still considered necessary? If i only need a pound of meat a day to survive but i eat two, is that still considered sustenance? Besides, isn't killing lizards killing for comfort, which, like killing for meat, comes under the broad category of killing to satisfy the human need?

Plus, whoever said that the human survival justified all actions? Don't we applaud martyrs in history because they were able to put some worthy cause over their own survival?

And then A. went on to talk about how pain is an important factor in deciding whether something is cruel or not. Like squashing a mosquito isn't, but squashing a lizard, with nerves and a beating heart and all, is. But i thought, perhaps pain is meaningless without a soul. Perhaps pain is like beauty or value, which holds meaning only to a sentient mind. While it can be argued that pain has a great physical component to it, but then, so does sadness, when your heart tightens and your tears come out, and emotions are only meaningful to a sentient mind.

And while i was walking to the library, i thought, pain is qualia. That means that pain is private and cannot be communicated directly to other parties. It's like colours, you cannot communicate to a blind person what green is. When teaching little children about colours, you can only refer to these colours via some shared experience, i.e. 'Green is the colour of grass.' But you can never be sure whether they are really experiencing the same thing. They may be getting the blue sensation when they look at grass, only that adults have taught them to put the name 'green' to it.

So it's like, can we can say that pain for a lizard is the same as pain for us? Perhaps when a nerve is stimulated in a lizard, the lizard feels quite something else. Perhaps we are imposing our experiences on the lizard, demanding that what is the case for us must be the case for it. Perhaps it is less unpleasant for a lizard to be squashed, afterall, with a body prone to squashing, they must have something that mitigates the unpleasantness for them.

But all these are just speculations.