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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

> It recommends against declawing, nicking, eyestalk ablation, the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers, and extreme slaughter methods such as live boiling without stunning.

I mean, that's all well and good, but if you take the "sentience" part seriously, then surely we should also consider in scope:

- bottom-trawling, dredging or other fishing practices which can casually kill large numbers of individuals

- ocean pollution

- warming oceans that may put whole populations at risk

Like, if the suffering of individuals is acknowledged, then surely reducing that suffering is important whether it's in a restaurant kitchen or on the sea-floor beneath a fishing boat. You don't get to ignore the harms your actions cause just because the effects are out of line-of-sight.

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Perfect is the enemy of the good.

Let's start somewhere and build on it rather than throwing a perfectly actionable plan away just because it doesn't solve literally all problems.

> just because it doesn't solve literally all problems.

one would be nice. But I'm ignorant on how many untrained experts are de-humanaizing (de-crustationizing?) crabs to begin with.

I just watched a youtube chef mangle and torture a live lobster the other day, all while claiming to be informed on how to humanely kill them.

I'm reminded of an episode of Masterchef where the cooks are given live crabs to prepare a dish with (as part of the meal, not as an assistant). Most contestants left the crab alone until it was time to boil them. One starts ripping the crab apart. Gordon Ramsay had to come up to her and explain that the crab was alive and what she was doing constituted torture.

>(as part of the meal, not as an assistant)

Did that really need to be said?

Sometimes I wonder how future generations will judge our meat industry practices once they figure out artificial meat production and also have a more accurate picture of consciousness/sentience and hence the suffering we cause. It's quite plausible that their judgement will be just as harsh, if not hasher, as how present day humans look at "savages" of the past.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next big division among generations is vegan vs. carnivores. Meat substitutes are getting better, and when/if the political subsidies for live farms ends and makes real meat cheaper then we'll see a lot of restaurants shift to those substitutes being the default. so real meat will become some sort of delicacy to have on very special occasions, for those don't simply forgo it altogether.

But then again, by then we'll be the metaphorical boomers, and a lot of our generation eats meat very casually. We may not see such reform in our lifetime as zoomers/millennials start to become the main body forming law. But probably some shifts in that direction.

On top of all the suffering, our habit of killing animals to eat them generates a lot of pollution (emissions), unnecessary land use, and water waste.

any metric you use other than the selfish “but it tastes good” shows that this is an absurdly negative thing we keep on doing casually and defending.

So is the issue lack of education on how to humanely kill, or youtube allowing that to be broadcast and/or monitized? Neither seem to be resolved with this new law.

> one would be be nice.

Stops grocery stores from selling live crabs to home cooks. That is one.

Stops kitchens from boiling lobsters alive without stunning. That is two.

Stops the practice of destroying the eyestalks of female shrimp. That is three.

If you belive that they can experience pain any of these is terrible.

The reason why crabs and lobsters are sold alive is that their quality deteriorate extremely quickly once they are dead (30 minutes and they start smelling funky and tasting weird)

I've quite a bit of experience on the subject. I've caught and cooked crabs and lobsters since I was a teen.

I generally don't trust the quality of pre-cooked crustaceans.

And while I agree that it is best to reduce the overall suffering of animals, I don't think that boiling is the worst part. They die in less than two seconds.

My understanding is that precooked crustacean meat is a byproduct of shipping loss (sh*t this crab looks like it's not going to make it, let's cook it before it dies). So yeah, not the freshest.

What is the worst part then?

The worst part is the agony, slowly dying and then be thrown away or hastily cooked to be sold cheaper.

The humane way would be to avoid eating crabs and lobsters off-season.

Killing with a knife or boiling water really is quick, unless you really don't know what you're doing.

> The worst part is the agony, slowly dying and then be thrown away or hastily cooked to be sold cheaper.

Certainly, that is worse.

There seems to be some uncertainty over the speed at which boiling will kill. From [1]:

> Scientists have found that it can take lobsters between 35 – 45 seconds to die when plunged into a pot of boiling water — and if they are dismembered their nervous system can still function for up to an hour.

This wasn't the only one, another claimed hours (and it wasn't an animal welfare page either). Difficult to track down the source of any claims though.

[1] https://cookchefgirl.com/boil/how-long-does-it-take-for-a-lo...

The speed at which boiling water kills an animal is directly related to the ratio between the contact surface and the volume.

For usual crabs and lobsters the volume is low enough and the contact surface quite large, their bodies are not sealed, boiling water enter directly inside.

I think it can take a few seconds longer for huge crabs, especially if the water volume is not so large.

If you cut the head of a lobster, I think it can suffer for an extended time before dying, but not if you cut it in half longitudinally, as this is usually done when cooking them grilled.

I've carefully observed the process, and there is no question about it.

>If you belive that they can experience pain any of these is terrible.

Sure, I believe they experience pain. I don't see these as major issues, however.

- who cares if it's the butcher or the home cook who kills the crab? I imagine the kinds of cooks buying live seafood care about that freshness (I have never bought live seafood). If they torture the food afterwards, that's on the cook, not the vendor.

- I don't have strong feelings about how the metaphoical sausage is made out back. I am aware that I am eating a once living being. As long as it's dead and properly cooked to not make me sick, what a chef in the backrooms does what they need to do.

- Same as above. They are being killed, they probably do need to take out the face before serving. I'd rather do it quick and painlessly, but I'm not on that side of the industry.

So yea, not strongly convinced here.

So your argument is "I don't personally experience any of this, so I'm not convinced it's a problem"?

Interesting argument. It's kinda Main Character Syndrome though. There is a counter-argument which goes: "Bad things happen even when you're not around to witness them. We should probably do something about them".

>So your argument is "I don't personally experience any of this, so I'm not convinced it's a problem"?

no, it's more along the lines of "I don't see the larger impact being imparted here". the counterarguments here haven't given me reason as of now to see it either. I just see it as some way to pretend to be nice to animals while proceeding to mass fish them to extiction regardless.

But some of those problems are millions of times worse than others. Solving the trivial ones constitutes some sort of theatre.

When you solve part of a problem, and it is minuscule in scope, you have still solved part of the problem. Why let that demotivate you from wanting so solve more of the problem?

Nobody is motivated to solve the bigger problem. This theatre is masking an unwillingness to face global issues. It's a political gambit. "We did something! So quit bothering us until next session."

I remain motivated. I applaud all of the work that has been done so far and I also demand much more. Not only do I think this is a useful perspective, I think it's the only realistic path forward. To take the alternative perspective - that anything other than massive change is worthless - is a far more effective way to demotivate people and get them to give up and clock out.

The problem then is not doing something, it's people not caring because they've done something. So I still don't understand why you take issue with this.

This lays down the foundations that can be used to tackle the larger problems while gradually tightening the restrictions.

Implementing radical change overnight without the mechanism to enforce it will guarantee failure.

I think you stand a much better chance to mobilize society against a million-times-worse problem they've never considered that happens invisibly, far from shore, on the seabed, if you first prime them to agree that the small problem is real.

It's possible that vested interests will try to twist the narrative once it begins to turn against them: "Do your part to sort plastics into bins, not the trash! Pay no attention to the single-use packaging manufacturers generating all that difficult-to-sort, difficult-to-process waste." "Freshwater is a resource that needs to be conserved! Turn the 1 gpm tap off while brushing your teeth. Ignore the 1000 gpm center-pivot industrial farm growing alfalfa in the California desert." etc. but that's risky.

I think that recognizing that invertebrates on the ocean floor can be victims of animal cruelty is step 1 in reducing trawling, pollution, and global warming that harms those animals.

Gotta shift the public before you shift the public policy. Making the public think about other living creatures first, that's the way democracy works. They could set the laws but if unpopular with the public then they could pitch those people out and put ones in who will reverse the policy, unlike say in Russia or China who don't care about public opinion until it approaches the level of rebellion.

Parent is probably advocating for parrallel/independant actions. It's not like this specific group of researchers has to tackle all the animal issues in the world one by one, and has to set priorities on their agenda.

Bottom-trawling should be outlawed, like dynamite fishing. By-catch laws don't work, and the ecological harm is like hunting deer be putting the forest on fire.

Pollution is already illegal (but poorly enforced) and global warming should be illegal but enforcement is evem more tricky.

This new law is irrelevant to these points. Vertebrate animals were already considered sentient in UK law. So sharks, dolphins, turtles, fish etc were already covered.

Your outrage comes several years too late.

The new recognition of cephalopods and decapods are is relevant to these points because they can be and are killed by these human-driven factors, and experience pain and distress.

The UK's recognition that fish can suffer doesn't seem to have forced the elimination of the UK's fishing industry. That industry intentionally catches and kills large numbers of fish but incidentally kills plenty of other kinds of animals, including cephalopods and decapods, through the extremely untargeted practices.

My understanding is that bottom-trawling is still a permitted in UK waters, and as of a couple years ago, was even still allowed in most marine protected areas.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/17/uk-fishi...

I'd hope that this can be a foothold for future legal action - maybe someone could argue that bottom-trawling is an extreme slaughter method and then bad that

Definitely glad to see this being the direction we move though

I don’t know, you can hope but people are cheap bastards.

Gassing of pigs with high concentrations of CO2 is pretty cruel.

Cruel enough that CO2 was expected to be replaced with inert gasses like nitrogen in the early naughties.

It takes them minutes to die and they do not go easy.

If you want to eat animals that one thing but the least you can do is give them a quiet death.

CO2 is cheap though and people like cheap more than they like humane. So now CO2 is used for 80% of UK pigs.

If anyone wants to watch there’s a video attached:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/02/sufferin...

Hey, those sound like great things to tackle next!

Actually, if you took "sentience" seriously, you would also need to ban any captivity or killing.

Also this whole thing leads to somewhat interesting moral questions from evolutionary perspective. Would we allow domesticated species or breeds to go extinct? Pigs might survive outside. But what about dairy cows, or various breeds of birds?

Should we just release them back to nature and possibly let them die out there?

> Should we just release them back to nature and possibly let them die out there?

Some of those animals you would need to force to leave.

I had a dog growing up and like you can leave the front door open and occasionally she'd go out it but come meal time she was going back in that door.

Had happened before with a small viviparous fish species used in labs in 60's I thing. After being banned from experimentation, the species disappeared from labs "overnight". As nobody was breeding the fish anymore, when the habitat of the wild populations was destroyed people discovered too late that there was not a safety copy and the entire species vanished. We could have it still except by a stupid law that nobody remembers anymore. The stupid politicians that wrote it are dead by now probably or wouldn't care less about the consequences of their actions.

This lobbies simply hide or ignore that they don't have alternatives to the problems that are creating and will soon hit hard.

A species is not some kind of treasured unique token. It's not a thing. It's a process. It only seems like a thing because humans like to find patterns and give them names.

Outside of practical considerations wrt. biodiversity, why should we care? I mean, if you don't think individual members of a species are entitled to a good life, or at least life free of needless cruelty - then why would you care about their species? Conversely, if you think the species should be saved for reasons other than entertainment or practicality, then I think it only makes sense if you think individuals of that species deserve better conditions.

This is philosophical BS. A species is a species. Is a technical term [more or less] well defined that is the basis of all live sciences. Is also the product of millions years of evolution so when lost, is irreplaceable.

> Why should we care

This is exactly the problem, that animalist evangelists don't care. They do it just for the dopamine rush and the sweet money while avoiding carefully to notice the negative consequences of their acts.

Animalists have a tunnel vision focused in individuals and about not activating a particular random type of receptors (that evolved as a life-saving mechanism). They are blind or cynical about everything else. When we scratch the surface there is a lot of cargo cult ideas, tons of magical thinking and very outdated XVII century scientific knowledge. With luck we can see a thin and unstable crust of real knowledge on life sciences at most.

> This is philosophical BS. A species is a species. Is a technical term [more or less] well defined that is the basis of all live sciences.

On the contrary, most of philosophical BS starts from a mistaken belief that categories are a thing. They're not. They're just fuzzy selectors. A "species" is a technical term, and so is a "chair" or a "rivet". Good enough, as long as you don't zoom in on it too closely. If you do, you'll find the boundary of the category is fuzzy (and if you ask another person to zoom in with you, you'll discover your fuzzy boundaries don't fully overlap).

The "basis of life sciences" you refer to is a historical artifact. People like to categorize and give names to things. They did so according to their practical needs and tools they had. We have better tools now - particularly ones that let us see how life ticks. Genetics is pretty much upending the old taxonomy "that is the basis of all live sciences", because up until ~100 years ago, we had no first clue what's actually going on.

And if you look at what the modern life sciences discover, you'll see that organisms indeed break the usual definition of "species" in every possible way.

In a way, species not being a thing is also fundamental to evolution - after all, how would one species evolve into another, if not through intermediary forms that are kinda both, and kinda neither?

> Is also the product of millions years of evolution so when lost, is irreplaceable.

Well, yes. But that doesn't immediately make it valuable. Random googling says the estimate is of about 8 million different species of plants and animals on Earth, with barely a million classified so far. That's a lot of diversity, but losing any one of them hardly matters. Something else will take its place. It may not be exactly the same, but similar enough.

If you disagree, then ask yourself why. Why value "the product of millions years of evolution"? Could it be a practical reason (e.g. it may have evolutionary adaptations or genetic patterns useful for us)? Could it be aesthetic reasons (it's pretty)? Something else? It's good to name it.

(Personally, I mostly care about biodiversity for practical reasons - primarily ecosystem stability, and secondarily medical and biotech research applications.)

You've not actually answered the relevant question: Why care about species, but not about individual suffering?

There is no sensible answer, because your emotional attachment to the consumption of dead animals, and the very understandable resistance to the idea that you may have supported (and continue to support) needless cruelty of immense proportions has made you blind to "the negative consequences of [your] acts".

On the practical side, since you supposedly care so much about species: Have you ever put any thought to the idea that all the ecological destruction we cause, just to feed the 7 billion animals of a handful of species, has destroyed far far far more species than it has "saved"?

I'm not sure there is a moral question with regards to the animals.

If we stop breeding pigs and cows we won't have the huge amount we do now. The pigs and cows don't care if their species go extinct.

Letting them go into the wild would be cruel since they aren't prepared to exist out there, but letting them die in the wild vs die in a factory farm isn't much worse of a fate.

In reality, we should stop breeding them, send existing aninals to sanctuarys (which we should fund) and be done with it. Within 20 years, all of the existing farm animals will die out from natural causes.

The real moral question is: how do we support the farmers?

We should ensure that they get their wages replaced and get assistance in moving to a less cruel industry than animal farming. There are already groups that help with this, but they'd need funds to scale their work.

Saying pigs and cows don't care if they go extinct is a bit of a weird stance. Sure nonextant cows don't care about not existing, but neither do dead cows care about being killed, so it's a bit of a weird criterium.

Do current cows care about being alive? I'd say yes, but then never being born or being killed should seem about equally bad from their perspective. If anything not existing is worse.

I think their point is that a species cannot suffer, only individuals can. Under that consideration, it seems downright hilarious to keep individuals perpetually suffering just to keep a species that didn't occur naturally anyway alive.

The whole topic becomes a straight farce once we realize that our "conservation" of these species costs us thousands of other, far more ecologically useful species. Like in the rainforest, for example, where we grow feed for cows, and pasture cows.

> In reality, we should stop breeding them, send existing aninals to sanctuarys (which we should fund) and be done with it. Within 20 years, all of the existing farm animals will die out from natural causes.

I’ve never heard (or thought of) this proposal before.

It makes sense from a harm-minimizing perspective, but in practice, even as a vegetarian who thinks the world would be better off if people didn’t eat meat, I’d be okay with the current crop of animals being eaten as the end to factory farming.

>Should we just release them back to nature and possibly let them die out there?

IMHO, not my field.

Most of the wild animals that live a time in captivity needs to learn again with human help where obtain again food before to completely return to the wild.

If domesticated species were going to be released, by extrapolation I deduce the matter would be to know to what extent did they lost their instincts (due human selection), and how they could be guided along N generations to recover it (this plant smell is poisonous), or if the above is to much to learn at least were to find the food, for what an habitat would be needed first, in companion of a high number of animals for to keep a high genetic diversity, with migration paths (climate, group mixing, etc).

Feral hogs are a huge problem in the USA, pigs absolutely would thrive if you let them go, they are very intelligent, can eat just about anything, and learn very quickly... milk cows not so much.

This article highlights that their decision is based on an ability to "experience pain, distress or harm." In not all cases will that distress align with captivity.

Well-cared for dogs seem pretty happy, for example. They're in captivity but not suffering, and can live lives with social bonds, play, etc. Being separated from their humans can make dogs distressed. When one gets sick enough, euthanizing it, though sad, is probably the merciful thing to do.

If a small fish is in a large, well-maintained aquarium, is it in pain or distress because of its captivity? I've seen some very well-run aquariums, and if the fish are all suffering, it doesn't seem obvious.

I think the point is if you take their ability to suffer seriously, you don't take actions which subject it to pain or distress. But captivity doesn't strictly necessitate suffering.

But yeah, we could stop eating animals, or penning them in feedlots.

Democracy is ugly, and not everyone gets what they want, this is another step in the right direction.

Why? Lots of sentient animals kill sentient animals of a different species. Why should humans be different?

I wish. Maybe one day…

What about killing? If their interests are to be valued then surely we shouldn't kill them. I'd much rather be declawed than killed.

This isn't to say I think killing lobsters is wrong, I just think the moral reasoning is fatally inconsistent.

> bottom-trawling, dredging or other fishing practices which can casually kill large numbers of individuals

I don't believe these techniques are used for lobsters, crabs or octopuses

But they still kill loads of them

If such an absurd ruling were to be taken at face value, these creatures would be owed human rights.

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