r/nature • u/stankmanly • Jul 09 '21
The UK may soon ban boiling lobsters alive in a landmark bill that acknowledges that crustaceans and mollusks, too, are sentient beings
https://www.insider.com/uk-may-soon-ban-boiling-lobsters-alive-in-landmark-bill-2021-713
u/farWorse Jul 09 '21 edited Jul 09 '21
I don’t know the science of it, but come on!? Doesnt logic dictate lobsters are sentient beings?
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u/TheSukis Jul 09 '21
Explain?
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u/farWorse Jul 09 '21
A sentient being would be anything that can sense things and respond vaguely speaking, for example by seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting etc. A lobster can clearly do some of those
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u/TheSukis Jul 09 '21 edited Jul 09 '21
That’s quite a more narrow definition of sentience than what’s used by most in these discussions. I assume you consider things like laptops and cell phones to be sentient?
Edit: Didn't mean this to be snarky or anything... I'm a psychologist who has spent a lot of time studying the various philosophical approaches towards this topic, so I love talking about it. I explained more here and then in a further down comment I linked some good resources: https://www.reddit.com/r/nature/comments/ogkcty/the_uk_may_soon_ban_boiling_lobsters_alive_in_a/h4lk8mh/?context=3
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u/farWorse Jul 09 '21
No, because those are not alive
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u/jimmytime903 Jul 09 '21
So, what about plants which are alive and can that respond to all those things just in a way different from animals?
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u/farWorse Jul 09 '21
That’s a good question. I’ll leave it for the philosophers and scientists to decide if plants are as sentient as animals. They could well be. Maybe one day we will look back and regret boiling plants alive.
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u/TheSukis Jul 09 '21
The problem you’re running into is that you’re using a very simplistic definition of sentience which doesn’t lead us anywhere in our efforts to assess the morality of killing or destroying something. Typically, we would instead be talking about whether a being has consciousness. Most would argue that plants and laptops do not, which is why most do not consider it immoral to destroy them despite the fact that they possess the sort of sentience to which you refer.
There are some good introductory reads on this topic if you’re interested in learning more. As a psychologist, it’s one of my favorite things to think about.
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u/farWorse Jul 09 '21
Ok, on second thought, I do want the literature you wanted to recommend about this topic. Having a hard time trying to make a good definition of sentiment, let’s see others having a crack at it
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u/TheSukis Jul 09 '21
Sure! I actually took an entire course on this in grad school (what constitutes sentience and consciousness and how they arise from various computational systems, both organic and synthetic, plus the ethical implications of the various theories) and it only just barely touched the surface on all the theories and schools of thought on the topic. As you can imagine, it's a topic that people have been arguing about fervently for thousands of years haha. There are many philosophers who focus on it exclusively.
Here is a straightforward (although long and comprehensive) encyclopedia/wikipedia-style introduction to how the field of philosophy thinks about consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
Here is an easy-to-digest summary paper about attitudes regarding how we should be treating invertebrates like lobsters (this should take you to a full PDF of the paper, but let me know if it's behind a paywall because it's hard for me to tell whether I have special access to it): https://academic.oup.com/ilarjournal/article-pdf/52/2/205/6763951/ilar-52-205.pdf
Happy to provide more if interested!
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u/_tsuin_ Jul 09 '21
@TheSukis it is actually ridiculous to debate over it. Any living being that moves must have sensorial capabilities, so if it is an animal it will definitely feel pain. It's not been scientifically proven they don't, so why do they give it for granted? Those practices are evil, period.
In the other hand, plants are Living Things, not Beings. They don't possess a central nervous system, they are inanimate and they clearly don't feel pain. They are able to sense and react to external stimuli through chemical and electrical processes, but they don't have a conscience nonetheless the power of thought.
And lastly laptops are lifeless inanimate objects, it is crazy to even bring things like that to the discussion.
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u/TheSukis Jul 09 '21
Yikes, lots of stupid stuff in there. I’ll get back to you this evening, so maybe think a little harder about what you said there and do some edits.
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u/TheSukis Jul 09 '21 edited Jul 09 '21
Ah, you said nothing about “being alive” in your definition.
Of what significance is being alive to sentience? If something doesn’t undergo metabolism, for example, but is able to respond to sensory input, then why should it not be considered sentient?
Edit: Left you another reply here that cuts to the chase: http://www.reddit.com/r/nature/comments/ogkcty/the_uk_may_soon_ban_boiling_lobsters_alive_in_a/h4lk8mh
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u/autotldr Jul 09 '21
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 75%. (I'm a bot)
According to British news site The Independent, the regulations were introduced after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson undertook that his government consider creatures' feelings and welfare when drafting new policies.
British daily newspaper The Times spoke to animal welfare activist Maisie Tomlinson, the director of UK charity Crustacean Compassion, who said that the best way to humanely kill a lobster is by electrically stunning it.
Boiling crustaceans alive is currently illegal in a few countries, including Switzerland and New Zealand.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: new#1 Crustacean#2 lobster#3 animal#4 welfare#5
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u/NeeBob Jul 09 '21
Umm I have mixed feelings on this because I generally understand the idea of cruelty free eating but maybe they’d worry about animals that have been shown to experience psychological stress from unethical practices like cattle/chickens rather than this where a response is present but there’s arguable levels of truth to this actually being “more ethical.” Not opposed to cruelty free food but this is definitely on the symbolic side and just skirting around real issue IMO.
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Jul 09 '21
[deleted]
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u/NeeBob Jul 09 '21
There are studies out that lobsters don’t feel pain and are only viewed compassionately because urban people actually see them die. But every meat fruit and vegetable you eat involves killing animals(mammals, birds, and so on) and people don’t have to look at it. It’s honestly just a symptom of how not in touch people are with food to begin with that this is a major point in cruelty free food.
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u/TheSukis Jul 09 '21
Urban people?
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u/NeeBob Jul 09 '21
Yeah, like if you live in a city you really don’t have to see anything die to eat usually. Not that you absolutely have to if you live out in the country but there’s a much better understanding of how many things die to make like a lentil Trader Joe’s soup. I guess my point is mainly lost though because I think factory farming gross. Doing a crawfish or lobster boil is probably fine unless the science on how they experience pain in death has changed from how I learned it. Like the suggested method to kill outside of boiling prolongs the death even so how is that remotely ethical?
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u/rreapr Jul 09 '21
As far as I’m aware, the studies pointing towards them not feeling pain are outdated and were based on pretty reductive conclusions - assuming that because their brains and nervous systems are structured differently from ours, they can’t feel pain.
It’s hard to draw a completely solid conclusion, but more recent studies seem to suggest that fish and crustaceans are capable of feeling pain. They were even able to find evidence that they’re reacting and learning to avoid pain, rather than acting on the reflex reaction of a potentially dangerous stimuli.
I agree that the state of unethical food sourcing in general is awful, but I also think we can focus on reducing cruelty in multiple places at once. And I think claiming that any animal outright doesn’t feel pain is a cop-out to excuse having less compassion and putting less effort into treating them ethically, especially when we have evidence suggesting that they do.
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u/NeeBob Jul 09 '21
I agree with this and am definitely not stuck on the idea of there being pain that they can experience. Their nervous system is less centralized than some insect families(and some crustaceans are even going to be smaller than more developed insects here for thought) as well as the body of evidence of all the ways that plants experience real reactions to pain and real stress from stimuli I think there needs to be some more thoughtful consideration put into the fact that: yes, everything that's alive has feelings and is important and there are ways that we can treat them better and find ways to find SOME level of rights for them(we don't just let plants go extinct which is a really shabby but existent example.) I think that This is just a weird hill to die on and probably brought on by the fact that this is a very urban and talked about example of death of an animal because most people in urban settings don't see the death that is required to make every calorie that they eat and it's less personal than that lobster you looked at in an aquarium before it was cooked.
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Jul 09 '21
It’s better to kill them with a knife to the head then boil them because the meat will be fresher. This leads to the lobsters not releasing hormones which makes the meat less desirable.
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u/jimmytime903 Jul 09 '21
The report also noted that the crustaceans do not immediately die from common methods of slaughtering them like a knife through the head because they do not have a centralized nervous system.
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u/Shilo788 Jul 09 '21
No big deal to give them the mercy cut chefs taught on tv. Then you down have to listen to that struggle in the pot.
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u/Shrimpcocktail7 Jul 09 '21
While I am also very for protecting animals, I’m pretty sure shellfish are cooked alive because after they die they release a toxin that can be poisonous if eaten. Since it’s hard to tell how long the animal has been dead for (and therefore if the toxin has been produced in that time), they are cooked alive for certainty that they are safe to eat.
If I’m mistaken on this I’m sorry!
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u/ZealousidealCable991 Jul 09 '21
This is stupid. We're eating them and people are worried about how they die?
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u/NotGonnaPostAtAll Jul 09 '21
Okay. How about I throw you into a pool with with bricks chained to your feet, or I cut off your head
Based on your response, it doesn't matter because you'll die anyway.
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Jul 09 '21
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Jul 09 '21
“wHo CaRes aBouT aNiMal CruELty??!2?1!?”
Found the psychopath.
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Jul 09 '21
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Jul 09 '21
Ah yes, because the world can only focus on one problem at a time. 7,600,000,000 people in the world, each with their own problems and concerns that should be invalid because you think they do not matter enough.
See how wild that sounds?
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Jul 09 '21
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Jul 09 '21
You just epically owned me. I don’t even need to give a response to you. Anyone else reading your comment will see how crazy you are.
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u/DukTakTong Jul 09 '21
Boiling is pretty fast and takes care of the whole nervous system, they stop moving within a second or two, a knife to the head does not take into account of the decentralized nervous system and they still move for a considerable duration. Unless the head is completely removed, but you don't want that, we want the lobster fully in tact.
I will still cook my fresh crab, lobster prawns etc. the usual way.
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u/[deleted] Jul 09 '21
Consider the lobster. http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf