Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.

does one need to feel pain in the same way for it to be classified as pain. pain is pain. one of the things that unites us as humans is our ability to feel it and empathize with another.

if an animal can feel pain it doesn't matter if it is the same pain. Also I recall that Nirvana once sang "It's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings". For generations people thought that is true.

Some in my family call themselves Pescaterean because they for some reason don't want to inflict pain on animals (that look like us).

my point is pain is pain - the rest is just mental gymnastics that allow us to justify our own behavior.

There is no easy, or even hard answer at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.

I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random.

Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

It's complicated.

This isn't a moral argument for me, it's simply giving a fair comparison as to what the likely choices are for these animals. The choices are not pain from humans or some pain-free experience in nature.

I will say that being boiled alive is likely one of the worst ways to go though - luckily there are nearly painless alternatives to killing lobster that many people employ.

"your withdrawal from a hot kettle is a different pain from the pain that you then contemplate. In the first case, the pain from withdrawal from a kettle, there is no qualia, no meta-representation."

From his framework, to truly "experience" pain, there needs to be a sense of self. You need higher levels of cognition for the "meta-representation" that causes suffering in our human conceptualization of the term. (There's some interesting brain lesion studies about people who lack this sense of self. They can witness their own body interacting with the environment but have no actual "experience" of the action; it's as if they are watching someone else perform it.) Everything more primitive to that higher cognitive function is just stimulus-response. For example, Gerald Engelman draws the line at lobsters in terms of what "experiences" pain and suffering. The implication being anything below that from a neural perspective would be cruelty-free to consume.

However, "capable of feeling sensations" is defined in different ways and thus leads to the large differences in when people say a fetus is capable of feeling pain.

Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?

All of those thresholds are crossed at different stages of fetal development so which threshold you use will change the answer you give for "when does a fetus become sentient?"

Are you suggesting the odds of that are so low that they’re laughable? Because they’re not..

It's the high end, so that's the threshold if you're using a particularly picky definition of 'sentience'. It seems like a defensible position to me, that if you stopped brain development around 30 weeks you wouldn't see much self-awareness.

I don't understand what your point with this.

Women's libido is heightened around ovulation (and men react to that), the menstrual cycle can be irregular (specially before the first pregnancy).

500 years ago science was less mature, and unable to determine what was objectively silly, and what wasn't.

There are many plants that clearly respond to stimuli (Mimosa pudica(shy plant) as well as the Venus flytrap). As well as almost any plant following the light to grow, as well as plants that send out tendrils to anchor.

> "The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy"

I'll agree with you that we have no knowledge of plants being conscious.

> "sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions."

That would be _sapience_, not _sentience_. Which is the point. Sentience is a ridiculously low bar to clear.

Overall the point here is that sentience isn't a very useful measure of anything. If there were an explicit law recognizing the rights of all living things to a decent death, we would essentially be forced to become exclusive carnivores, as its almost impossible to euthanize a plant or fungus.

OED: "The Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a subjective collection of usage 'dos' and 'don'ts'. However, it does include information on which usages are, or have been, popularly regarded as 'incorrect'."[1]

Merriam-Webster: "Merriam-Webster is a descriptive dictionary in that it aims to describe and indicate how words are actually used by English speakers and writers. Generally, the descriptive approach to lexicography does not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of "correctness," unlike the prescriptive approach."[2]

OUP: "All of Oxford Languages' content aims to describe, rather than prescribe, the way languages are used by people around the world."[3]

I believe your definition comes from one of the Oxford dictionaries - iOS lists it as coming from the Oxford Dictionary of English, and Lexico (a partnership with Oxford, whose About page links to [3]) includes it[4].

[1] https://www.oed.com/public/oed3guide/guide-to-the-third-edit...

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/descriptive-vs...

[3] https://languages.oup.com/about-us/how-we-create-language-co...

[4] https://www.lexico.com/definition/dictionary

First, it is a unconditional limb/muscle reaction that is hard-coded. It’s uncomfortable but doesn’t constitute “suffering”. Then there is a sensation: burning, broken, cold, etc that makes you do something in the range of acting to reduce the damage to screaming (message danger to others and maybe get help) and kicking erratically (to counteract a predator). It’s more close to “suffer”, but short episodes don’t really add up to long-term or intensive “anguish”. Some people have high pain tolerance, but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it, they simply don’t change their state of minds so much. And then may come the understanding that you’re going to unfair die or become disabled for life, and these feelings and thoughts may be comparable to a situation of no physical pain at all, e.g. if you end up with an unfair life sentence. So basically my idea is that dying in pain is just a very negative sum of these negative components, but consciousness is not the key. It only helps to see your fate, whatever it is.

Which parts of “pain” we are trying to reduce by these laws is unclear.

According to NOAA, in regards to US totals[1]:

"Overall, the highest value U.S. commercial species were salmon ($688 million), crabs ($610 million), lobsters ($594 million), shrimp ($531 million), scallops ($512 million), and Alaska pollock ($413 million)."

[1]https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/american-seafood-industry...

Right. And the Spartans weren't Greek but Spartan and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Laconic dialect. And the Athenians weren't Greek but Athenian and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Attic dialect. And so on.

But I wonder, which is the one true Greek language that all those dialects were dialects of? And who were the true Greeks who spoke it?

Or should I ask, is every bit of information in the article just as dodgy as the bit I quote above?

There's a specific carnal aspect to eating meat that I imagine is lost on a lot of people, especially when they don't have firsthand experience butchering animals. For me, it was when I was gutting the first deer I killed. There's this weird thing where you become incredibly conscious of the movement of your internal organs when you are holding another animal's warm entrails. It's almost entirely physical rather than mental, like what it feels like when you meditate on your breathing, except instead of breathing it's the pressure of food sludge sliding down your intestines.

I realized that me and the deer are both just slightly differently-arranged sacks of meat. I always thought I'd have some revelation about the sanctity of life when I killed a deer, but instead I felt an immediate detachment from it, like how I'm just part of an uncaring physical system ("nature") and that system doesn't care about my "morals" or lack thereof.

Sorry for the weird pretentious rambling. My response is that humans are part of nature, not apart from it, that nature has no morals or good or bad. Morals are just this weird thing human brains do to cooperate as individual members of a species to increase our fitness and individually to feel better or worse. I care about other humans because I care about them. I don't care about crabs because I don't care about them. They are two separate, non-intersecting roads in my brain. I don't mind if you think I'm a heartless psycho for articulating it this way, in fact the main drawback of this way of mental mapping is literally the social stigma of being considered heartless and cruel, which is why I am less likely to phrase it this way in IRL conversation. But I feel nothing when I crush a house fly (rather, I feel great satisfaction at getting rid of such a nuisance, and I think most others would feel the same), and feel nothing when I boil a crab alive except the pleasant anticipation of a delicious meal.

But for some science showing botanists using emotional language for plants in action, here ya go: https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/scaring-soybeans-def...

It'd be interesting to see data from beyond 2013 included in that chart, though. Thanks for sharing!

I'll grant most people would prefer less suffering to more, but most importantly, they don't care enough to do anything about it.

Vegetarians+ just wish there were a silent cohort to back them up.

My uncle took me through his slaughterhouse when I was about 5. It was like a horror movie of screaming pigs, blood everywhere, heat, stench. Probably thought it would be fun for me to see, I don't know. I still love pork.

In the same way, creating unnecessary suffering also creates sadistic societies that lead to a lot of harm.

So there is a golden mean in which a natural amount of suffering is recognized as the price of life - we will all suffer and die, but in exchange we can also live -- and people have historically been mature enough to accept that and decide the combo of life+suffering as better than the combo no-life+no-suffering.

Specifically for the case of livestock, none of those animals would have been born if they were not going to be eaten, so for humanely raised animals, the suffering imposed on the animal when the farmer sends it to slaughter is not so great as to outweigh the life given to the animal by the same farmer. This can be viewed as the definition of humane animal husbandry.

Of course there is a lot of animal husbandry that is not humane and this type of animal husbandry is unethical. That's why there is a big movement for full pasture-raised beef and grass fed beef without hormones, as well as pasture-raised chicken, etc.

Similarly for the hunter, killing the octopus or salmon or deer is not worse than some other animal doing the same or the animal dying of some other cause, so there is not a net increase in suffering for the animal's life simply because a human eats it as opposed to some other animal eating it.

This of course depends on the ecological system being in balance. Killing an animal takes away one meal from its predators but also saves the lives of its prey. An ecological system is in a steady state when everything eaten is replaced so again suffering is the price of life within a balanced ecology, and that ecology includes human hunters.

By the same token, overfishing or overhunting that drives animals to extinction is also not humane, while hunting and fishing that does not is humane.

By the way this is why vegetarianism in western societies is primarily practiced by younger people who feel as if they are immortal and aren't really faced with the understanding that everything in life must be paid for with suffering and death. They view suffering as strange.

Others do not, and that's the dividing line. It's not that people don't care, they just aren't convinced that hedonism is a basis for a healthy society and they look for a wiser, more balanced ethical system that values life with suffering, and that includes the life of animals hunted or raised for food.

"I would like a chicken", "dead or alive, feathers on or feathers off?".

To say it simply, there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do. There is much about our practices that absolutely reflects an absence of consideration - shouldn't we be working to improve that?

Saying that there is an inverse prioritization is not the matter at hand. We're not even on equal ground. It's just raising the bar for a thankfully growing number of different animals off the floor.

I maybe didn't grok your point of view on speciesism, though - could you try to reframe it?

The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.

You can live a full, healthy life while minimizing to as full extent as possible the suffering you directly or indirectly inflict on other sentient creatures.

The argument you present here against your characterization of the OPs point is akin to saying "my kid really loves McNuggets so I don't care about the horror 50 billion chickens suffer in a given year".

Again, the building isn't on fire; you don't have to choose one or the other.

Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here (although I don’t feel you’re arguing in bad faith, for the record - I can see how my comments may be taken that way). I don’t believe species ought to be treated equally but rather that we ought to give all species consideration.

It’s curious that this view is considered so extreme by so many, while the treatment we inflict on living beings, which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.

As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than the way we treat the billions of mammals currently trapped in the dystopian hell of factory farming.

If we skipped the animals and ate the crops directly it would be far more efficient in every dimension (calories/area, protein/area, environmental impact)

Not that long ago, humans routinely tortured, killed, raped other humans sometimes even just for fun (and in some places of the world very much still do).

Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question.

These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other property you deem worthy in a living being, thus making them inferior to another species.

Humanity also probably only survived difficult conditions because many of our ancestors raped and killed each other over rare resources and lack of willing sexual partners. Hence by your logic we also should be okay with being killers and rapists, because they're the only reasons we're alive.

Or you know, we could use our brains and recognize that our ancestors lived in completely different environments than we do and we also have a much better understanding of the world than they did. Hence it would be incredibly stupid to use their actions, world view and ethics as a foundation for our belief system.

The cows on my dad's farm probably had a better life than the dogs. There's a definite argument to made that they had a better life than me, and I was from a very happy and loving household. The same could not be said for the large scale conglomerate farm up the road. It's a distinction most people are simply incapable of making, because they just aren't exposed to it.

If you took two wild mammals and forced them to cohabit in a small area it would also very likely end in bloodshed.

Lobsters are known for having seasons in which they migrate. Even sources that say that crabs don't move a lot will describe that lack of movement as "will not exit a one mile area".

So when people say they ind hunting "evil" but farming not, that's the general idea.

Those minutes/hours/days spent experiencing pain do count. You speak as of the after-effects but make it seem that an advantage in living the process itself doesn't count.

That's like saying that we're all going to die anyway and there's no advantage to how we live our lives. So why bother with anything?