MPs: Octopuses feel pain and need legal protection
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.
The truth is humans are wired to gauge the level of environmental danger by looking for personably relatable aggression events. And there is a practical limit how low we should go. Also with living more dense, humans are gotten way better at handling various aggressive stimuli, like noise, air pollution, constant close interaction. We have stopped treating them as aggression, but it still is for the rest of life on this rock.
The difference is like us touching a hot stove and pulling away as an automatic response, versus the various forms of torture we've invented.
That doesn't mean it's right, just that there is a difference and we'll all draw a line somewhere. A bit like how people see eating cats and dogs as somehow different from chickens and cows.
Animals in the wild don't give a s** about the pain they cause to other species when they eat themselves alive, and eating a prey alive is the normal standard in nature.
This being said, I'm all for minimizing suffering of anything involved in the food chain as much as possible. I consider that avoiding wasting food is just as important as reducing the pain we cause to animals.
Er... why not? They seem fairly reasonable to me.
> ... boil them alive is one of the cruelest forms of torture I've seen.
eating food without causing pain
The OP doesn't say this is what should be done. OP says that we should respect our food and talks about the living conditions of animals we eat and how they are killed. OP doesn't say or imply that we should eat food without causing pain.
Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary. Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
I could go on and on. But you know, we’re all fucked from this behavior. In the name of money we will all perish at the hands of our fellow cheek-turners.
I don't think that's true. Have seen many a cat catch mice to "play" with until they're dead and not eat even a nibble.
I dont see a difference between mother killing prey for her cubs and butcher doing it for me.
I dont see a difference between farmer raising lambs and lion protecting his territory.
Is efficiency your only qualm? The only difference it makes is amount of life, not it's quality.
What's this quality of life horseshit? So if a person has "low quality of life" then i guess murdering them will get you a lighter sentence?
Sorry for using murdering as examples, I just dont have a better way to make the point.
Meat animals exist to be killed.
Please explain ketchup
> Murdering people is bad not because of some abstract causing of pain
Let’s just say it’s not, pain and suffering are still bad things youd want to minimize
You could say that the bad thing about death isn’t pain itself but the lost of life (otherwise an instant death would not be bad), based on the axiom that life is a good thing. You could also make your own axiom that only human lives are good.
> murder begets murder, making existence of organized society very hard and inefficient
So massacring uncivilized tribals that are not part of your organized society, like in the colonial days, is OK?
Do you eat ketchup without anything? It has little value on its own.
> So massacring uncivilized tribals that are not part of your organized society, like in the colonial days, is OK?
Am I back to country side? Why is there so much straw here?
Says one meatbag to another...
Well sorry, not sorry for trying to enjoy the only life that I have.
On the human side: the problem is the producers (of meat/dairy) hide the torturous aspects from consumers by abstracting it away. We go to the store and get some chicken breast, steaks, or pork ribs, but we don’t do ANY of the work to prepare that animal. It’s prepared by underpaid/exploited foreign labor.
In contrast, even if a wolf killed a bunch of sheep for sheer pleasure: they are doing the killing, which takes energy. And if the sheep has a herd of rams with them the wolves might come out bloody themselves.
NOTE: I’m talking about factory farms and large scale production. There are farms which follow good, holistic procedures—where the farmers do care about the well-being of the animals and the cycle of life, even when animals are slaughtered.
I definitely think there's a disconnect between the average person and their food and it allows this sort of thing to happen more easily. I'm not sure what the right way to handle it all would be until we can 3D print all our food needs, but free range farms and farming animals that require less space (such as insects) are probably the best we can do currently.
Do you seriously believe majority of people will eat that?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8372727/Thousands-p...
We can't control what orcas do in the oceans, but we can at least try to not be complete monsters to the animals we raise.
An instinct that humans have is to project their own kind of consciousness into animals. We imagine the world through their eyes, but from a human perspective. So some animals are wicked, others show love. But it is really unfair to project human expectations onto animals.
They're not constrained by thought or conservation, they're constrained by environmental limits.
That says a lot about how much you have observed animals so far. Predators have an instinct to kill more than they have a will to eat.
Bears love salmon brains. In boom years, bears will pull salmon after salmon out of the water, bite the head, and discard the rest. They're basically nature's dynamite fishers. Stray dogs will eat anything they can -- and they can and do kill themselves by overeating.
Nope:
> Surplus killing, also known as excessive killing, henhouse syndrome,[1][2] or overkill,[3] is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can immediately eat and then they either cache or abandon the remainder. The term was invented by Dutch biologist Hans Kruuk after studying spotted hyenas in Africa[4] and red foxes in England.[5][6] Some of the other animals which have been observed engaging in surplus killing include orcas, zooplankton, humans, damselfly naiads, predaceous mites, martens, weasels, honey badgers, jaguar, leopards, lions, spiders, brown bears,[7] american black bears, polar bears, coyotes, lynxes, minks, raccoons and dogs.[citation needed]
I'm not saying your point isn't valid, just that the passage quoted is too broad to be a strong support of your argument.
At any rate, there are always outliers, no? When someone makes a generally true statement, is it really that useful to reply with a rude "Nope" and point to outliers?
I took the parents' comment to mean that it is a general truth, not an absolute truth.
What is my argument? You're making some assumption there that I'm not privy to.
The OP says "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary". That's a very broad statement that obviously ignores surplus killing even for the purpose of storing more food for later (which is often also abandoned when the animals move away or find something better to eat). Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
Hence, "nope".
I agree my reply is rude. I apologise to the OP, but it's frustrating to see how popular opinions seem to be shaped by the behaviour of Disney animals, and yet are expressed with great certainty. It's very frustrating.
>Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]. That is, they were making a moral argument. "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
[0] Yes I know some animals have been known to do this, but they are the exception.
See: "Nope".
> The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0].
You are putting way too much interpretation on what the OP actually wrote: "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary".
That's not true: many animals will "catch" (really, savagely kill) more than necessary, much much more. In case you consider food stored for later "necessary", that also doesn't work: animals will kill much more than they can ever eat in an entire lifetime, much more than can be expected to stay in the ground without rotting away. Not to mention, many animals will just kill, without any attempt at storing or returning to the kill.
The OP also said nothing at all about hunting. They talked about over-fishing:
> Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
And also about ripping "mother cows from its children to mass produce milk and beef" and other things like that. Nothing to do with hunting, for sport or not.
> "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
I don't understand what you mean. Can you explain?
The OP talked about overfishing. You said they were referring to hunting for sport. Overfishing is relevant to commercial fishing, wich is practiced not for sport, but for food.
So it really doesn't look like the OP and you were talking about the same thing and I can't see that you should expect me to automatically understand what you meant when the OP said "over-fishing" and you said "hunting for sport". If you meant "hunting under water for sport" you should have said that more clearly, because it's not the first thing that springs to mind when someone speaks of "over-fishing".
Edit: here's the relevant quotes from earlier comments.
OP: "Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil."
You: "The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]."
Can you see why it's not immediately obvious why you think you're talking about the same thing as the OP?
Also, can you see why these discussions get derailed so easily? The OP said one thing and then you joined the conversation to explain what you thought the OP meant. But how could you know what the OP meant any better than me, when neither of us is the OP? If there are different interpretations to what the OP said, then your guess of what they really meant is as good as mine. So when you insist that, no, your interpretation is correct, and here's what they really meant, even if they used different words (words that may be stretched to mean what you want to say they meant "literally", like "fishing = hunting undewater") there is inevitable confusion and the discussion is derailed.
Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should? And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
You chose to ignore that. In doing so, interpreted my comment uncharitably.
>Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should?
When did I stop the OP from commenting? What a bizarre thing to suggest.
>And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
No, I'm not. That's why I attempted to disengage.
It was you who started this particular chain off by being combative and rude (by your own admission). Then you refused to accept the basic principle around the idea of generalizations. It was you who has been combative and have failed to interpret other users' comments charitably. Both the OP's comments and mine.
Remember likening the OP's statement to a child who gets their understanding of the animal world from Disney movies? You did that right after you "apologized" to the OP for being rude. See the problem?
Not everyone deserves empathy, either.
Could you expand on that? I’m always curious to understand how other people think about these issues.
If I see people that are with causing folks around them pain, of whatever type, my usual suspicion is that they suffered some sort of massive pain or trauma themselves that they never found a healthy way to deal with.
If not, then obviously the normative argument of “well, lots of animals do it...” isn’t nearly morally sufficent for human behavior.
depending on the socio/political background it is just to erase individuals who do not comply with the societys goal / judification system, speaking of death penalty or in other situations disbelievers & heretics. even in non-radical ethnocultural religious systems it is justifyable to use entities who are regarded of lesser value. or - if one belongs to the wrong political faction - it is also ok and just to strip away any so called basic human rights (just call sb a terrorist and therefor a prisoner of war, and - tadaa - it is ok to do so). guidances such as some in stone written rules are also not for the greater good, but to keep sheeps in line and not to support any outgroups. other ideological ideas/works/concepts/books are always used to support ones own position and goals. "humanism" is just another word for a moral ethical system which puts one sentinent species above other sentinent species.
in other words any moral is as good as the other. be it based on abstract concepts, words believed to be from higher entities or taken from animal kingdom. in the end the one who sits at the non-dangerous end of a gun is the one who is right.
if you want something absolute take this:
the one thing that we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.
The C-level and oligarchs of the world tends to be highly empathic, hence their politicking skills, persuasion, observational skills and general theatre, but not particularly sympathetic.
Twitter is a mix of demonstrations of high empathy/low sympathy and every other permutation
It seems you forget that not only humans are capable of feelings and empathy.
Why would the monkey do such thing?
Well, you see, the monkey was saving the fish from drowning. What an empathetic creature!
Are you kidding? How do you suppose one can feel pain without a nervous system? Magic?
Plants are immobile. The only mechanism they have for moving about is relatively slow and lacks agency. They can grow in a particular direction, send out a clone,or use reproduction. A hormonal reaction to external stimuli could trigger that kind of behaviour. But what advantage would there be in having a consciousness? A chicken on the other had can run away. It can hide. It can learn to avoid damaging itself. Pain has an advantage.
No, it's the opposite. Plants clearly don't have the reactive aspect, but we have no idea whether they have the experience aspect, because we have no idea what causes experience or how it works.
We also don't know that consciousness provides an advantage to animals. We associate consciousness with intelligent response. But it may well be possible to have intelligent response without consciousness (e.g. like computers, although technically we can't be sure that they don't have consciousness either)
We can speculate that the full human experience of pain may exist in the absence of a brain. And we can estimate the probability of that being the case in plants. Do you really think that probability is high?
Also, plants can and do react to damage and even touch.
There is a tendency, in animal welfare discussions, to ratchet. As the conversation tips forward and back, meanings are interpreted a little more strictly each time.
Backyard chickens is a respectful way to have eggs and meat. Battery raising is disrespectful. Wasting meat is also disrespectful.
Towards chicken? Maybe. But chicken isn't the only variable in the equation. I agree it'd be much less wasteful to grow meat in bioreactor without even wasting energy on growing feathers, organs and whatnot. But we're not there yet, and we might have a hard time feeding people without chicken factories.
Same for crabs. So far in the last two years I've seen crabs cooked alive twice right before my eyes, once roasted and the other boiled. I tried to intervene but was laughed away or told there was no time. In the second case, the lady who boiled the crabs alive didn't want to hear about their agony while eating them later (of course I had to twist the knife in).
I thought all this is just stupidity and ignorance. All it takes is five minutes to think, five minutes to go online and ask a question of a dumb search engine, and another five seconds for the chicken and a bit longer for the crabs. How hard is it? I mean, come on.
Btw, I eat meat and I'll be vegetarian when hell freezes over but you kill an animal to eat it, at least don't torture the poor beast. Just get it over with quickly.
This I can completely agree with. Wasting food is completely disrespectful in so many ways and is mostly avoidable.
Yet, just last year we saw supply chain breakdowns that caused farmers to dump so many potatoes and so much milk among everything else while people were in queues for free food.
In times or places where this abundance is not as shockingly unnatural, the feeling of the food we consume takes less importance. And, as others said, it's not just animal. Killing a plant, often in way more atrocious manners, is just as bad.
We'll probably have to murder and massacre our food for a bit longer. Live with it and work on synthetic food, this will resolve the problem you have with life-sourced food. Well except we'll probably still have to kill millions of animal and plants for population control. Heh.
You know we also kill, without asking their opinion or respecting them much, other more exotic life-forms, like virii or bacterias, that are as innocent as the rabbit you had in your last civet. All they did was follow their instincts, and they didn't have a choice contaminating you; but you had a choice killing them.
Is that just guesswork?
https://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/...
> This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.
This will sound completely bananas to someone who doesn't live by the same principles as you do.
We can say that insects don't have the brain capacity to be conscious. I'm pretty sure we might say the same about many fish species.
Think about how useless our intuitions proved to be when it comes to other phenomena like gravity or electromagnetism. It took a while to (kind of) figure these out despite them being easier to measure than consciousness.
W.r.t. fish: they act in a way you'd expect a creature to act if they felt pain. If they had vocal cords and thus the ability to scream, would you agree that they feel pain? Same applies to insects.
I guess it also applies at some level to animals and insects - we can assume they feel some of the basic things as us, but their "understanding" of it might be quite different.
Why tie your hands with this kind of black and white thinking?
We could also really use a framework for recognizing and categorizing consciousness in other lifeforms. And translate that into a law that automatically applies tiered protection to all other lifeforms. We probably need to figure out consciousness in ourselves first, though.
Step off the concrete sometime… the solutions to the worlds problems and injustices are often far more complex and nuanced than what is proposed by the modern left.
Do you realize that much of American beef cattle actually graze on natural grasses for most of their lives… in largely natural settings that support complex natural ecosystem? That will not be the case for “Beyond/Impossible/Soylent” burgers; they will be composed of plant proteins that require toxic monocultures to produce.
We really don't need the amounts of meat (if at all), averagely consumed in the US, EU or many other places nowadays. Not by far.
And if you insist: there are plant based products today, that are often tastier and offer better nutrients than large swaths of the meat products they replace.
There certainly is no lab-grown alternative for a tasty slab of expensive beef (I presume, I haven't looked for it), but there certainly is a tastier and healthier plant-based alternative for that €2,99 bucket of fried chicken things. Or for 6 of the 10 cheap burgers at your supermarket.
Point: we really don't have to wait for lab grown meat. Not if you are a meat lover, nor if you are a habitual meat eater.
Define need.
I don't live to be a drone guided by some moral principles of other human who has the same rights as I do.
If I want meat - I will eat it regardless of whether I need it or not.
> And if you insist: there are plant based products today, that are often tastier and offer better nutrients than large swaths of the meat products they replace.
I hear the same mantra for last 10 years.
> There certainly is no lab-grown alternative for a tasty slab of expensive beef (I presume, I haven't looked for it), but there certainly is a tastier and healthier plant-based alternative for that €2,99 bucket of fried chicken things. Or for 6 of the 10 cheap burgers at your supermarket.
You forgot psychological factor. While the bucket of fried chicken is rarely as pretty before cooking as they display it, but in the end it is 100% meat. If we're talking about some plant surrogate, most people would probably puke at the thought of eating this. I certainly wouldn't enjoy it.
Plant-based meat substitutes are ridiculous. Americans, North and South, eat way too much meat (Europeans eat much less). To cut down on the extravagant amounts of meat consumed in the Americas is a great idea, but why do those need to be replaced with meat substitutes? Teach people to cook good food with plants, otherwise you're just keeping them dependent on the food industry that just wants to sell them cheap overprocessed shit that makes them sick and sad.
Why not attack that from all angles? Convince people to eat less meat and more vegetables…sure. But you will still have holdouts saying that they prefer the taste of meat. Hence plant based meat alternatives and lab grown meat.
There can be multiple solutions to a given problem.
I agree on principle but I'm not sure what you mean by "systematic animal torture". For example, for me industrial farming is just that, but small-scale farming (where herds are no larger than a few dozen animals, for cows, more for goats and sheep) are not.
So I think we'll disagree on that. Basically, I think some people find eating animals dystopic regardless of how it's done, while I don't.
If language evolution followed strict deterministic rules, then it probably would be "octopodes", but that's not the case - language changes and grows in all sorts of different ways and words become valid despite their "pedigree".
As your link says, "sources differ on which plurals are acceptable"; there's no single correct option and basically all of the suggested ones are in reasonably-common usage.
Elimination of pain and suffering as a primary value, changes everything. A superintelligent overlord given that objective would simply eliminate all life on earth. If preservation of life was a value, it would sterilize everything and put all existing life in a coma. If the objective was happiness, it would drug us during the coma.
But it would not be so dumb as to choose those things. I don’t know what it would choose exactly, but, I think it would have something to do with the purpose of life itself in this universe, which can be seen as a fundamental force to fight entropy at the mesoscale between electromagnetism and gravity.
Some, mostly modernist, occasionally platonist philosophers try to do this... but thats a philosophical exercise.
The way societies actually work is that we have values, because people have values. We rationalise, abstract, deconstruct, cross reference, expand, contract, torture, abandon, repurpose, revise and revisit those values in a never ending process. That is, in fact, what society is.
What you are describing is asimov computer code.
It's clear that humans over-consume and as an "intelligent species" who can make decisions based on morality and ethics, we still collectively seem unable to logically reason this overconsumption will eventually effect us all.
Why should individuals that live for themselves and don't share the same values as you do suffer because of your decisions?
We could live in a more ethical and sustainable way, we just choose not to
There's a line between exploiting others and caring for yourself. I consider myself example of second. I couldn't care less about rest of people.
> We could live in a more ethical and sustainable way, we just choose not to
I could live without shower and toilet paper, I could live without washing machine or meat. Doesn't mean that I want to.
If you want to live in more ethical and sustainable way — all the power to you. But don't force your moral onto me.
E: morale -> moral
> I couldn't care less about rest of people.
I can clearly see that
> I could live without shower and toilet paper, I could live without washing machine or meat. Doesn't mean that I want to.
Overconsumption isn't having toilet paper or a shower, those are necessities. Drilling in the Arctic for more oil, shark finning, the strive for constant economic growth are examples of overconsumption
Small fix to clarify. I'm not some cynical edgelord, don't misunderstand, I probably care a fair bit more about other people than your average person. But when it comes to situation where I have to give up something that I don't consider morally absurd, well then we have a problem.
> Overconsumption isn't having toilet paper or a shower, those are necessities. Drilling in the Arctic for more oil, shark finning, the strive for constant economic growth are examples of overconsumption
Sure. But we're discussing food here. I don't see why me, an average Joe, has to discard of the only joys of my life because someone thinks that it is morally correctly to switch to artificial meat.
Plenty of people don't have those, and survive just fine
Bacteria will form on your skin and can lead to infection. Maybe that's the answer to population growth, never shower or excercise good hygiene measures therefore increasing mortality rates.
We don't need to clean our teeth either right? We can lower food consumption through that too.
Very, very strange replies.
This is an argument against eating octopuses. Why should they suffer because of your decisions?
I mean, I'm probably just as capable as you of making "decisions based on morality and ethics" as you are, but I don't think it's immoral to eat meat. So clearly there are different interpretations of "morality" (duh). But your comment seems to assume that no, there's just one morality: eating meat is immoral. Why?
Eating meat is not wrong, overconsumption is wrong, wasting resources is wrong. The question of morality is, is it right to over consume the planet to the point we extinguish other species, or even our own? Are we comfortable that future generations look back on us as selfish and greedy for what we did, or didn't do?
I am not vegetarian, pardon the pun but that's maybe what your beef is about
Again, I''m confused by the very, very strange replies.
So now I'm very confused. Why did you decide never to eat calamari again? What does your decision have to do with a film about an octopus? What does any of that have to do with over-consumption?
You made your comment very confusing so I was confused. Thanks for clarifying, but it's still very confusing so don't go accusing me of having any "beef" with anyone. Just make sure your comments are easier to understand.
No it really wasn't confusing. Perhaps English isn't your native language, nowhere did I mention meat, unless you define a mollusc as meat (some vegetarians do choose not to eat them). I think you just wanted an argument on the internet which you'll find I don't do
Also, you are very impolite.
That said, whether to spend your energy on global poverty or abolishing factory farming really comes down to how you highly you rank animal suffering.
Is a thousand chickens tortured from birth to slaughter, worse than someone dying from malaria? What about ten thousand?
It's not at all obvious to me how animal sentience compares to human sentience, but it's clear to me that we should at least give it some consideration.
Even when I give animals only a fraction of the concern I have for humans, it's clear to me that factory farming is an incredible source of unnecessary suffering.
I hope we can learn to be considerate of not only humans different from us but other species too.
The really big issue staring us in the face though is that our treatment of animals is accelerating the pace of pandemics.
Every tightly confined animal farm in the world is another lab doing serial passage gain of function experiments with zero BSL protections by the lab workers.
Why is "artificial meat production" the norm in "the distant future"? Couldn't humans just as well re-organise their societies in small agrarian groups that produce their food without torturing animals?
We are very close to having synthetic intelligences. That doesn’t mean we should care about shutting them off or damaging them, as long as they cannot suffer.
But for synthetic intelligences, I think we need to be extra careful because the suffering can be there without any means to notify humans, if those means were never programmed in. If an AI has self awareness and self preservation goals comparable to humans, but no comparable e.g. English language subroutines, being shut off at random times would probably cause it to suffer psychological distress in silence.
This is all to say that for the sake of both AI and animals, we need to learn how to directly detect brain activity corresponding to pain, in different types of brains.
The vegetarian farming isn't more ethical either. Its usually mono-cropping at large scale. see also: corn.
These aren't trivial questions. The food industry has a habit of lacing processed food with so much junk its barely recognisable.
Well, you don't have to welcome it. That's the current world. Ask the lady who cleans your office toilets how often she eats organic, or even just fruit, other than tomatoes.
For the time being you can find such meat in countries outside the Americas that still have small scale farms, particularly in the EU where the prophylactic use of antibiotics on farm animals is banned since 2018.
" It seems unimaginative of you to suppose ..."
What is it with the personal tone in comments in these sorts of discussions? I've had the absolute worst experience discussing these things on HN, as opposed to all other kinds of discussion. Other discussions are generally civil and polite. When it comes to meat eating and animals' rights, it's a free for all and everyone thiks it's fine to walk all over good manners and attack other commenters' intellect, their morality, anything. I mean, wtf?
That's a bit of a strawman there. Improving food tech does not need to be a zero sum game. Can it not be that food quality will in general improve? Much like how access to clean water (at least in the Western world) has improved a lot compared to past centuries.
Right. Most animals feel pain...
> When you think of an octopus or lobster, what comes to mind? Seafood or intelligent marine life?
Many animals we eat in industrial quantities are intelligent life...
Honestly, WTF is wrong with this article. The level of argument is as if they've just found out to their shock that meat doesn't grow on trees.
Eating one crab is considered better than one octopus. What about 100 crabs vs 1 octopus? Where do we draw the line? Or if we consider something not smart enough based on our arbitrary criteria, it's open season to eat as much as we can of it.
We're mixing here categories that completely don't go together. Whether we hunt and eat an animal shouldn't be based on its intelligence. But rather on considerations of sustainability and ecosystem disruption.
This entire article seems extremely far off from making a coherent argument whatsoever that our actions should be based on.
Not at the same level as an octopus.
If this "discovery" is how they try to convince people to support the cause then they're out of touch with reality.
Is it wrong to boil lobsters alive? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/11/is-it-wrong-to...
Some key points from The Guardian article:
- Boiling alive lobsters is illegal in New Zealand and Switzerland
- Robert Elwood, a professor at Queen's University Belfast, is a leading researcher in this field. He believes lobsters should be killed before boiling.
- Accepted wisdom about crustacean behaviour to painful stimuli is that it is a reflex, not a reaction to pain.
- No experiment can answer questions about pain in crustaceans definitively, but Elwood's research makes him see "as much evidence for pain in crustaceans as there is in many vertebrates".
- The argument against crustacean pain is that their brain structure is so different to ours. We know where pain occurs in the human brain, but those equivalent brain regions do not exist in crustaceans.
- Robert Steneck, professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine, has been studying lobsters since 1983: "I'm not convinced they feel pain...The problem has more to do with how we anthropomorphise various critters"
- Maisie Tomlinson, a campaigner for a charity called Crustacean Compassion, says "It’s estimated that an edible crab that is boiled alive may take up to three minutes to lose consciousness. That’s something that would be unconscionable in a vertebrate animal, where they talk about milliseconds to lose consciousness [in a slaughterhouse]"
- Is there a best way to kill a lobster? For a restaurant, professor Robert Elwood says "I would have [a device] that gave them electrical stunning, which completely destroys the central nervous system in a microsecond".
Cooks have told me to either run a knife through their brain or throw them in a freezer for half an hour to shut them down.
Incidentally, I used to do the latter as a kid when catching bugs outside to feed a green anole I caught and was taking care of for a Boy Scout merit badge...
I have heard this too (e.g. https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/why-are-lobsters-cooked-...). I assume using a 'stun machine' will deliver a electric jolt to the lobster and it would be boiled immediately after.
>> plants add caffeine to their nectar to enhance their pollinators memory and cognition >> plants synthesize almost all known neurotransmitters
[0]: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Balu%C5%A1ka-Commentar...
It's of course not an excuse to be needlessly cruel. But it is a valid reason to re-consider how nature works. Leaving animals alone does not mean they get to die in their sleep surrounded by their loving families and mourned by their loved ones like we all hope for. Worse, a lot of the animals we kill in order to eat them exist solely because we eat them. Ceasing to eat them adds up to genocide.
We have entire sub species of all sorts of animals that would not exist or continue to exist if it weren't for the fact that we breed them in order to eat them. Cows, pigs, and chickens are good examples of animals that have no place in nature and would likely die out quickly because of the very same properties that caused us to breed them in that direction.
Many billions of animals would not exist if it weren't for the fact that we plan to eat them. Equating veganism to genocide is clearly a bit of a stretch. But just ask yourself if it is better for the animal and its species to not have existed at all or is eating meat under some circumstances perhaps not that unethical? It's what the rest of nature does after all.
[1] https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2867 [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57072922
This sentence itself is political and presents a cynical worldview.
Anything can be use as a political tool.
However, no psychologist would doubt than compassion is a fundamental trait of a healthy human mind.