Review of the evidence of sentience in molluscs and crustaceans [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Review of the evidence of sentience in molluscs and crustaceans [pdf]

lse.ac.uk

109 pointsrntn40 comments

Extracts from the LSE report summary below:

Recommendations relating to specific commercial practices

Declawing: We have high confidence that declawing (removing one or both of the claws from a crab before returning it back to the water) causes suffering in crabs.

Nicking: We also have high confidence that the practice of nicking (cutting the tendon of a crab’s claw) causes suffering and is a health risk to the animals.

Wholesale and retail: We recommend a ban on the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers.

Stunning: Current evidence indicates that electrical stunning...can induce a seizure-like state in relatively large decapods, and that stunning diminishes, without wholly abolishing, the nervous system’s response to boiling water. We interpret this as evidence that electrical stunning is better than nothing.

Slaughter (decapods) We recommend that the following slaughter methods are banned in all cases in which a more humane slaughter method is available, unless preceded by effective electrical stunning:

- boiling alive,

- slowly raising the temperature of water,

- tailing (separation of the abdomen from the thorax, or separation of the head from the thorax), any other form of live dismemberment,

- and freshwater immersion (osmotic shock).

On current evidence, the most reasonable slaughter methods are double spiking (crabs), whole-body splitting (lobsters), and electrocution using a specialist device on a setting that is designed and validated to kill the animal quickly after initially stunning it.

Slaughter (cephalopods): Various different slaughter methods are currently used on fishing vessels in European waters, including clubbing, slicing the brain, reversing the mantle and asphyxiation in a suspended net bag.

We are not able to recommend any of these methods as humane. On current evidence, there is no slaughter method for cephalopods that is both humane and commercially viable on a large scale.

Thank you. Peter Singer's advice to drop all animal-based products from one's life, to be on the safe side, continues to be prescient.

Here's a nice video[1] of somebody adopting a supermarket lobster and nurturing it back to health. clear demonstration to me that they are sentient and have personalities and mood (of a sort). after watching that, the grocery store lobsters are kinda heartbreaking, but i'm also a long time vegetarian so already predisposed to that.

i think aquarium keepers can be especially attuned to the personality types of marine animals. i've only been keeping freshwater fish and snails for under a year but they are super personable!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sI7WveN7vk

My partner works at an aquarium and the amount of personality that fish & marine animals have is incredible!

A lot of fish love sand/gravel baths. So when they spot a diver in the tank they’ll either look for food or wait for when to sprinkle sand/gravel overhead.

If you own an aquarium at home you can also begin to learn the personality of your tank critters. (I also define personality in animals as “different” from personality in humans. They are not equivalent, but individual animals still have unique behaviors that separate them from others in their species)

If you use Instagram, try and follow your local ZAA/AZA accredited aquarium or zoo. They often share clips of unique behavior & can often be pretty educational.

Please take this as an honest question: as a vegetarian and someone with likely above average empathy for animals, don't you feel uneasy about keeping fish in acquariums?

I eat meat so I'm not claiming any moral ground, on the contrary I very much keep in high esteem people who avoid animal products, but the idea of keeping a living creature in a tiny living space feels incredibly sad to me, and it seems surprising that someone like you would do it.

I’ve inherited a canary someone didn’t want, and I feel very much the same. I’ve considered letting it go, but it’s not a strong flier and the climate where I am isn’t exactly canary friendly. The idea that anyone would /buy/ a bird just to keep them in a cage is depressing.

The same thought applies to mice and other little mammals like sugar fliers, reptiles and amphibians, etc. I’ve cats and dogs that I adore, so I’m not anti-pet exactly, but if you take a step back and really look, the whole idea of pets is…not right.

I'd expect that birds that grew up in a cage will just starve if you let them go.

Birds can be happy living with humans. As with other pets, they need stimulation and they are social animals. Ensure they have enough time outside the cage. On YouTube are many examples of birds living happily with humans.

haha yeah, i've been conflicted about it since starting, and still am.

partly i have moved past the black and white moralization of it, into something that's more of a heuristic of minimization in order to guide me through the more grey parts of life. pets is a really really hard one for me, because i share your intuition, it's not kind to restrict their freedom, but i also enjoy that bond with them.

ultimately, i don't have a reason more than it's just one of the places in my life that brings me a lot of joy. my family and i can't have kids or a dog or anything, but i love having animals around. the bird feeders are another daily enjoyment of mine. the fish are really beautiful and i take the best care of them i can. there are very few of them in a quite large tank, but yes i also get a weird sad feeling while watching them pretty frequently...

thanks for asking though, it's a good thing to continually re-evaluate. i don't know if it's something that i can indulge in long term.

Thank you very much for your answer!

Konrad Lorenz discusses this in Solomon's Ring. He says that it's fine to cage animals that have limited territory in nature. Thankfully, many reef fish, like clown fish, have limited ranges in nature, so thrive in tanks.

> This report is commissioned via LSE Consulting which was set up by The London School of Economics and Political Science to enable and facilitate the application of its academic expertise and intellectual resources.

The foreword is "By Professor Nicola S. Clayton FRS FSB FSPS CPsychol FBPsS Professor of Comparative Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge" and the focus seems to be on "welfare". Makes sense?

> In reviewing the relevant evidence, there are inevitably challenges, especially juxtaposing evidence from the field of comparative cognition, where the emphasis lies in ruling out simpler explanations for a given behaviour, response or performance on various problem-solving tasks with evidence from animal welfare, where the question revolves around potential capacities (such as the potential to experience pain).

I was going to post that first part, so thank you. Clayton is not listed as one of the authors of the report; they are (p.85):

Dr Jonathan Birch is an Associate Professor at the LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and the Principal Investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, a five-year Horizon 2020 project investigating animal sentience.

Dr Charlotte Burn is an Associate Professor of Animal Welfare and Behaviour Science at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) and Deputy Head of the RVC’s Animal Welfare Science and Ethics Group. Burn’s research interests include the mechanisms and motivations behind animal behaviour, animal perceptual abilities, and how to make concrete improvements to animal welfare.

Dr Alexandra Schnell is a Royal Society Newton International Fellow in the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, and a Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. As a member of the Comparative Cognition Lab, Schnell specializes in investigating the cognitive abilities of cephalopods and corvids.

Dr Heather Browning is a Research Officer on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project. Before joining the project, Heather completed a PhD on the measurement of animal welfare at the Australian National University. Alongside her academic work, Browning has also worked as a zookeeper and animal welfare officer.

Dr Andrew Crump is a Research Officer on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project. Before joining the project, Crump completed a PhD in Animal Behaviour and Welfare at Queen’s University Belfast, exploring how human activity impacts animal cognition and emotion.

I think being rigorous about definitions of things is good, kudos to the authors for that. I do think this is important for defining how we treat animals and AIs.

However, they seemed to pick something that obviously matches the criteria? This is a 100 page paper that comes to conclusions like "octopuses feel something like pain" and "declawing crabs is not fun for them".

I think this framework would have been more interesting to apply to creatures where this is less obvious like tardigrades. I actually don't know if they meet criteria for sentience.

the reason for them doing this is we process a lot of these animals industrially for food.

they are providing a scientific justification for humane practices in treatment and processing of these animals.

Yes. This is very much about practical ethics rather than just theoretical philosophy of mind.

why stop with crustaceans ? trees have sentience too just look into how they respond to predation ... when under attack from say insects they launch a synthesis of molecules which attracts yet other species which feed on those insects ... do not limit the scope of precious life forms to those with similar awareness / feelings / response time frames similar to humans ... life is far more subtle than we can ever imagine at this early stage in human awareness

Because most people's empathy doesn't extend to trees. That is the simple factual answer. All these other games about what trait draws the ethical line are post hoc. The reality is people feel it is bad to hurt animals they can empathize with.

Though, to be fair, i don't personally think ethics can work any other way. We don't have slaves not because it is an objective crime against the gods, but because culturally it is wrong. Until your computer becomes sentient that is, then we will have slaves for another few centuries.

To be clear, this is regarding sentience, not sapience.

How sapient is your dog? This is calling for more humane treatment when slaughtering these creatures. I'd prefer it didn't happen at all.

My dog isn't sapient at all. He's quite sentient, though. Judging by the paper we shouldn't be killing octopuses at all, let alone inhumanely.

I'm not sure that's salient to this conversation

It isn't, but he asked.

I just wanted to add salient to sentience and sapience ;)

> Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to contemplate and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight.

Dogs are more than sentient. Part of their behavior is learned, they have knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense (with both dogs and humans). No idea if insight has been studied in dogs specifically, but it isn't a human exclusive either (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23231629/).

By that definition any sentient creature is sapient.

Which, I mean, they are. Here's a litmus test: Is that creature so simple that you (or a suitably skilled technologist) could build one? If so then it's not sentient/sapient/a person/something we shouldn't be mean to. If not then maybe we should pay it a little more respect.

That argument is pretty weak, technological advances may allow people to create pretty complex beings in the near future (assuming we can't already).

Sapience was probably defined hoping to make it a human exclusive, but recent science has eroded the idea of a qualitative singularity in humans. We are merely quantitatively different.

Even single cells can be conditioned using the Pavlovian paradigm, which is a basic form of learning.

I'd expect an entity with complex and immutable information processing ability (no writable memory) to be purely sentient.

Yeah, it wasn't meant to be an abiding definition, just a right-now thumb-suck feasibility test. "If I can code you, you're probably not a person."

You're bang on the money with sapience being originally intended to be a merit badge for being human.

I'm guessing your last line was just riffing on functional purity but if not, my definition of sentience (which is a superset of consciousness) includes perception of current and past self-states which means (by my definitions, at least) an immutable construct isn't sentient by itself. I guess if you always pass in a self-state-vector then the system of (construct, self-state) could be conscious?

Name any creature in the world, and I'll name a human who can make you more of them, for a price.

It's especially ironic because the very dogs in question were engineered by humans over vast generations, with a genetic engineering technique called selective breeding.

Dogs aren't just built, they're designed.

Breeding creatures using those creatures doesn't count and you know it.

I've stopped eating octopus-containing foods, including takoyaki, after learning how smart those little creatures are. They've only got one or two short, brilliant years on Earth... I don't need to be making things worse for them.

What does this distinction mean to you, and which of the two is more significant and why?

"Sophontic" would be a more accurate term for my meaning but almost nobody would know what I'm talking about.

which of the two is more significant and why?

Neither is more significant. I was pointing out that the study was regarding body-awareness and basic emotional response in the animals, not trying to demonstrate, for example, that octopuses are as intelligent as a (insert age) human child. It's about squids noticing when you hurt them, not octopuses appreciating music.

That word is so rare that your comment is the 4th search result hit on DDG: https://imgur.com/xSyGRT1

Where is sophontic used?

It originated in SF novels, apparently: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sophont

It was first used by Paul Anderson in Trouble Twisters (1967) and Anderson's spouse Karen claims to have coined it. (Though I still have never heard 'sophontic', and I've never heard 'sophont' used outside sci-fi/fantasy. I was wondering in the GP if it's used elsewhere.)

* https://sfdictionary.com/view/298/sophont

If anyone wants an excellent dictionary of sci-fi / fantasy terms, look at the (free, online) Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer who has had a career with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and others. It started as an OED project to record sci-fi words and IIRC still has access to their internal databases.

* https://sfdictionary.com/

They have other interesting features, like a list of words coined by author:

* https://sfdictionary.com/most_first_cites_authors

And they want help, if anyone on HN happens to be familiar with sci-fi or related literature: "It is hoped that the site will grow to include subfields or related areas, such as gaming, comics, or anime/manga."

* https://sfdictionary.com/how_to_help

love how they take 1 page defining sentience beginning with this jewel: "the capacity to have feelings". begs the question no?

They list 8 separate empirical criteria for sentience, and evaluate them each in detail for the different species involved.

"We have developed a rigorous framework for evaluating scientific evidence of sentience based on eight criteria."

  1) possession of nociceptors;
  2) possession of integrative brain regions;
  3) connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions;
  4) responses affected by potential local anaesthetics or analgesics;
  5) motivational trade-offs that show a balancing of threat against opportunity for reward;
  6) flexible self-protective behaviours in response to injury and threat;
  7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation;
  8) behaviour that shows the animal values local anaesthetics or analgesics when injured.

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