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".