• Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    iirc mice don’t have the same response to capsaicin as humans - they can taste it, and don’t particularly like the taste, but it doesn’t cause them pain like it does in humans.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        From a tiny amount of reading (and a complete lack of a biology degree…) it’s that the rodent taste buds just react differently to the capsaicin, so it doesn’t hit the sodium channels in the pain receptor ‘stack’ in the same way as it does in humans. It’s not the total lack of reaction like you get with birds or some ungulates.

        I think.

    • proudblond@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      This is interesting. A popular squirrel deterrent for bird feeders is to put spicy stuff on the seed. I’ve been trying that lately and the squirrels have completely left my bird feeder alone. So there must be something rodents don’t like — unless squirrels are just built different?

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I assume so. I have had critters gorging on my ghosts and reapers in the garden. Losing an entire plant overnight was the last straw so I have webbing up now, but they were clearly unaffected.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Am I just missing where they claim that? From the conclusion:

        Altering the palatability of this feed to rodents through the addition of capsaicin may greatly enhance traditional methods of increasing poison bait acceptance on poultry operations

        That they avoid the taste has nothing inherently to do with the ‘pain’ experienced as a result of consuming it - in the preceding section they discuss other strategies to increase bait acceptance, including adding rodenticide to preferred bait foods. That rodents have taste preferences isn’t really in question, that they have a pain response to consuming capsaicin is.

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            The question was never if subcutaneous injections of capsaicin produce a pain reaction, nor how the effects of neonatal exposure to capsaicin effect the development of a rats life (even if there are impacts on the sensitivity of a response in TRPV1 as a result, your second link pretty clearly establishes that that is not a strong indicator of pain response to capsaicin in rodents, though it doesn’t go on to establish specifics thereof). Neither of those have to do with the consumption of capsaicin, though the second article is pretty interesting! It doesn’t establish a relationship between baseline “rodents” and TRPV1 response though, nor does it make any claims about severity of response or exposure sensitivity (which are not the goals of the paper), but that may be because the only english copy I can find of the article is a fairly abbreviated version of the full chinese text (and I uh… do not read written chinese very well at all, let alone discussions of technical biology).

              • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                Okay, I’m starting to question if you’re reading the articles you’re bringing out here?

                with the proportion of each reaction among disgust reactions similar to that induced by bitter and sour stimuli

                First paper states in the abstract that it isn’t measuring a pain response, the paper goes on to clarify that (and has some pretty horrifying descriptions of the surgical procedure…) and is explicit that any response is based on mouse behavior, making no attempt to compare it to human reactions (because that is a really tricky question to answer in a rigorous manner, lets be real)

                The second is studying the LD-50 of capsaicin - and yeah I bet they had a pain response, since they were given so much of it some of them died of stomach ulcers. It does not at any point discuss the pain response from consuming it, beyond that they died, only the symptoms after consumption.

                These are both fundamentally irrelevant to the topic at hand.