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Study Suggests Crabs Can Feel Pain
tritonman writes "A new scientific study suggests that crabs can feel and remember pain. From the article: '"More research is needed in this area where a potentially very large problem is being ignored," said Elwood.
Legislation to protect crustaceans has been proposed but it is likely to cover only scientific research. Millions of crustacean are caught or reared in aquaculture for the food industry.
There is no protection for these animals (with the possible exception of certain states in Australia) as the presumption is that they cannot experience pain.'
Perhaps soon there will be a study to determine that vegetables feel pain as well, then all of the vegans will only be allowed to eat rocks."
if they feel pain? Cattle defiantly do, we still eat them.. As, I'm sure, a wide variety of other food stuffs feels pain as well..
I find it genuinely scary how little the majority of commenters here feel for the way in which animals are killed / whether they feel pain. Fine, we eventually eat them, and I agree that the method of killing is of little consequence: but why is it necessary to give them an extremely torturous death prior to that?
If they do indeed feel pain (which I think they must: The excuse that they don't is just an excuse for a quick and easy + cheap method for executing them) I hope this study helps push more humane methods for killing crabs (and lobsters), because after watching them boil alive in tins etc. it makes you squirm thinking of the millions of these organisms facing their last minutes on this planet in blinding pain :(
Well semantically, the difference between "Experiencing pain" and "Displaying pain behaviours" is so thin as to be non-existent. Might as well assume they're the same thing.
As the same time, I agree with you. Nearly every living thing has a stimulus response to being damaged, including many plants. You have to draw the line somewhere.
Besides, what's the alternative? Whacking the head off with a cleaver first? It'll still flop around. If they didn't want to be killed by immersion in boiling water, they should have skipped the ol' exoskeleton.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Actually, the study shows that crabs avoid electrical shocks. Do they experience it as pain? Who knows. Considering that the nervous system uses electrical impulses to transmit information, an electrical shock directly affects and interferes with the nervous system.
I think the point in all this is to determine whether or not killing a crab by dropping it into a pot of boiling water is less ethical than killing it in some other manner. The problem I see is that electricity and boiling water are not at all the same. Maybe they don't have pain receptors for heat, thus, to them, their body basically stops working when boiled, and that's that. On the other hand, an electrical charge will definitely negatively affect their nervous system, regardless of pain receptors, temperature receptors, etc, and that would be something they would avoid, if just because they don't want their nervous system to act all haywire.
So really the study doesn't match the actual "inhumane" conditions enough to be able to bring about change in the treatment of these animals.
Better known as 318230.
If we're discussing the ethics of inflicting pain, I think it would actually be on yourself to prove that concious thought makes pain worse, rather than others to prove that crabs have concious thought.
I think what is being argued is that crabs "feel" pain like my thermostat "feels" temperature. They both react to their environments and respond to external stimuli. But, without a consciousness to experience that pain or change in temperature, it is unwarranted to assume a crab "feels" anything at all.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Feeling pain and reacting to it are different then suffering. Even changing
behavior based on pain is different then acutally feeling the pain later. That requires
a certain level of empathy.
The real test to me is show a crab another crab being killed in a painful way. If
we can detect pain receptors firing in some way in the crab then I think we have to worry. Otherwise the crab is just saying "putting pincher in trap BAD".
Your dog for instance will get freaked out if he sees someone hurting you while a cow on the other hand will only freak out if it gets startled. I could strangle you in front of a cow and
it would just sit there eating unless we made enough sound as to scare it...but it would not be
scared of the strangling.
...that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider...
This being the crucial point of disagreement. A lot of our food is capable of suffering. The point where ethicists disagree is on the question of whether this matters. A common view is that moral consideration is only warranted for moral agents that are capable of engaging in moral reasoning, and thus capable of reciprocating moral consideration.
A less technical way to put it is that the average lobster doesn't give a shit about whether humans suffer, so there is no reason for humans to give a shit about whether lobsters suffer.
Looking for simplistic rules to guide your ethics is not really the answer.
I can understand the urge, though. There's lots of good eats out there that would suck to have to give up because we eventually figure out they suffer. But being morally responsible actually means doing the thinking that's involved to understand whether suffering happens, and taking the actions that you can to minimize it.
Acting 'as if its in terrible pain' is not the same thing as being in terrible pain.
I'll have to remember that if I ever come across you acting as if you're in terrible pain.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I just don't get how people can make this argument, most of the time justifying it saying 'it has only so and so few brain cells'.
I'm not a crab an neither is anyone saying crabs can't 'feel pain' like humans do. But I do know that there's lots of other animals that are not human, but that show without any doubt that they can suffer from pain much like humans do. Somehow most people who think crustaceans don't 'suffer' do agree that dogs or cats can suffer from pain, probably because they can identify with a suffering pet much more easily than they can identify with a suffering crab. The fact that you call assuming crabs 'feel' anything is 'unwanted' seems like you don't really care that much and feel better not thinking they might actually suffer.
For me, the fact that crabs have simple brains and no 'reason' whatsoever doesn't imply that they can't experience pain and suffer from it like other animals or humans. You only need nerve cells to transmit the pain stimuli, and crabs have these. So why not just assume that being boiled alive isn't exactly a pleasant experience for crabs and lobsters and swiftly drive a pin through their brains before boiling them?
The question is does their form of pain "hurt"? We'll never know that. After all, we don't even know why pain hurts for us humans; all we know is that it does indeed hurt and is not something we like to experience (unless you're masochistic).
You asked the question, and then you answered it. Evolutionarily speaking, if the signals that indicate you're being injured are unpleasant to you, you're more likely to avoid the same injury in the future, because you remember the unpleasantness. That gives you an advantage over anyone who doesn't think the injury signals are unpleasant, and it's why masochists (who actually finds those signals pleasurable) make up a minority.
Everyone trying to attribute conscious intellectuality to pain isn't thinking it through. Consciousness just means you'll be better able to avoid the unpleasant feeling, because it allows you to analyze exactly what brought it on and extrapolate to similar situations. What matters isn't consciousness, but memory: If you can't remember (at least on some very small level) whether a certain action was pleasant or unpleasant, then it's not going to help you in the future. So there's no evolutionary benefit to actually feeling an unpleasant sensation associated with the injury signal.
Think of it in this way. If you accidentally put your hand on a stove, the injury signal travels through your nervous system to your brain. Before it gets to your brain, your spinal cord will send the necessary signal to cause you to move your hand back (because this is really important and wasting time would lead to more damage, and put you in an evolutionary disadvantage). As a result you move your hand away, and the pain doesn't come for another second. If you don't have any capability for memory, the job has been done, and the feeling of pain that comes later doesn't help at all. You won't remember and you'll do it again. If, on the other hand, you do remember the incident, the feeling of pain later on is what prevents you from putting your hand in the stove again. You want to avoid the unpleasantness.
What it comes down to is basically this: It doesn't matter if crabs thrash around when they're in boiling water...that doesn't mean pain, it could mean the reflex of taking your hand off the stove. However, if they can show that crabs avoid situations where they were injured before, that means memory, and it means pain. In which case, the boiling them on hot water before killing them swiftly can be argued to be really unethical.
City boy, are we?
Because while I can't swear to having said that kind of thing myself (having spent most of my very young days in a smallish town), I certainly remember hearing very similar comments from my little sister growing up in a village of maybe a thousand. A herd of cows would be taken right past the house twice every day on their way to be milked and back, and we'd sometimes walk down the road to where there was a flock of chickens we'd feed breadcrumbs. She knew perfectly well that the ultimate fate of those cows was likely to be hamburger, and I'm quite sure more than once we came back from feeding the chickens to find roast chicken awaiting us on the table at home.
If you've grown up with food animals being a regular part of the landscape, and knowing full well why they're there, well... then you don't consider it monstrous. It's perfectly reasonable and natural, and comments like the above are par for the course and actually kind of cute. What's monstrous is this gulf between a romantic idealisation of farmyard life, and the shrink-wrapped processed meat at the supermarket - the complete categorical disconnect between Babe and bacon.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
One dumb lobster trick is that if you hold a lobster with one hand on gripping its back it will struggle and twist to get free but if you move it close to you other arm or leg it will grab your arm and feel safe because it's feet are gripping something.
One dumb human trick when they see a tiger is trying run away. Of course they don't know that we tigers can run way faster than them and we always manage to catch them. The funny thing is that when you finally claw them they still try to fight! I, as a tiger, I am not entirely sure humans know they are alive, let alone feel pain. I think I'll have human steak for dinner tonight.
No sig is good enough for me.
"On the other hand, I'm completely against eating octopi and squid because they are extremely intelligent,"
I have never been a fan of one sided restrictions. They are unbalanced and often invite disaster. For example, I am sure those "intellignet" invertebrates would have absolutely no qualms about eating you if given the chance, regardless of your dietary abstinence. If Murphy is on enforcement patrol next time you are near a large body of water you will probably be eaten by a giant squid.
My threshold for excluding something tasty and nutritious from my dietary palette (and palate!) is much higher than some clever observed behaviors. On the day I receive a signed treaty from said invertebrates promising to never eat human flesh again I will seriously consider not eating them...quid pro quo, reciprocity and all that. Until then pass the calamari and Tako. I'm top of the food chain and I'm HUNGRY.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.