If these creatures can experience pain in the same conceptual way we do: they painfully clipped the ants legs and they didn’t return them to normal. Those ants were in hell.

Else: it was painless and the ants still had stump legs for the rest of their existence.

Which is why the meme is “Haha funny tall ants are dumb” instead of the slightly less fun “Ants without legs are confused af”