• Question: can trees feel pain

    Asked by owens7r2 to Amy, Drew, Julia, Sara on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Drew Rae

      Drew Rae answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Trees can react to external stimuli (pressure, sunlight, water). They can also respond to injury by redirecting resources. They don’t have anything remotely similar to a mammal’s nervous system though.

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Technically no – because they don’t have nerves (which are our pain sensors!). But they are pretty amazing as they will respond to damage and infection by releasing chemicals that cause bits of them to heal over or to drop off to stop the infection spreading. That is pretty cool.

      But even though they can’t feel pain as such don’t hit them because its not nice!

    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Hi owens! Trees can’t feel pain the way we do, since they don’t have a nervous system as Amy and Drew have mentioned. Our nervous system is what enables us to process pain. It transports signals that we’ve been injured from the point of injury to the brain. This causes us to respond by moving away from whatever is inflicting the pain upon us – for example we jerk away when we put our hand on a hot stove.

      Trees don’t have a nervous system and they don’t have any way to move away from negative stimuli (such as a fire for example). However, they do respond in the best way they can. Drew’s got some great examples here! Trees respond to all sorts of stimuli and they try to heal themselves when wounded. I am sure for the tree it is very traumatic to get a branch cut off, despite the fact that the tree might not feel it the same way we do! So no they don’t feel pain, not in the sense you or I do, but they have their own mechanism – so possibly they “feel” it very differently! They are such foreign creatures, who knows!!

      Fantastic question owens!!

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