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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."
Newsflash: most animals can feel and remember pain. We still eat them and don't give a damn.
It's called being on top of the food-chain. We are omnivorous and don't really care what we eat, where it comes from and how it died. We just want it in order to survive.
In the last few decades there have been some improvements on how cattle is treated and the way they are killed in the factories, nevertheless the average cow, pig or chicken has quite a hellish life before it ends up on your plate.
Compared to that most crab have a wonderfull life, they mature in open sea. Get fished up and a few hours later killed almost instantly.. Not bad if you look at the way animals are treated in industrial cattle farms.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
I'm not objective enough to actually endorse the following rationale but:
An argument could be made that the animals lack value in the same sense that we value a human. Let's set aside the idea that humans have no objective value either and say that they do given our subjective empathy with the human experience.
Just because it recognizes and reacts to pain doesn't necessarily signify anything other than the fact that we recognize that it recognizes and reacts to pain.
Lots of videogame badguys take damage and react accordingly to preserve their lives. The Emotion engine for example is a physics/animation/AI package licensed by game developers to provide this behavior(as seen in GTAIV and Star Wars: Force unleashed). It allows the AI to assess damage, recognize potential harm, and attempt to preserve itself. People thrown through the air will put their hands up to protect their head and face, they'll take hits and attempt to reassert their balance after the impact. Pedestrians who are shot will panic and flee as best they can. But it's still just a game. The virtual characters only have virtual suffering.
(If games aren't your thing, you can think of Cylon pain instead).
One might be able to regard the animal's suffering on a lower level with a similar rationale.
I'm not sure about the rest of the slashdot membership, but I have cooked many lobsters and I have never seen them "thrash about" in an attempt to escape... in fact, they are quite lethargic in normal cold water, and don't move at all once placed in the boiling water. This quote is a blatant lie.
Ewwww! On the other side of things, dairy cows tend to feel pain when their glands are swollen, so milking them does indeed feel good to the cow.
"Little is much when little you need."
I have seen chefs put lobsters in the freezer so they (presumably) go to sleep and die quietly.
Is this more or less humane I wonder.
"A lobster is like an insect... both almost programmed like simple robots."
I'm a scuba diver and dive most here in California. Here, the rules are that lobster can only be caught with bare (or gloved) hands. So it's a bit of a sport and the lobsters mostly win. But I can clearly see that lobster run on reflex. They never "think" and they are all born with the same reflexes.
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. Other than this one "design flaw" their reflexes are perfectly tuned to their environment. Enough so that you'd swear they were "smart". I'm not convinced at all that they even know they are alive.
If you place a live lobster on the dry sand on on the beach and then approach it like you would underwater the dumb thing will use its same reflexes and try and swim away. Of course this fails. I'm pretty sure they are just robots with out a few pre-programmed behaviours.
Crabs are even more stupid with maybe only a half dozen pre-programmed behaviours. They can't even feight when their life is in danger. They either freeze, run, display pinchers or swim. No other complex behaviours.
Neither crabs nor lobster if you chase them will take into consideration what you might do next. they just scoot "away" even to the point of bouncing off random objects as they flee. It's clear when you see them that they are not "fleeing" so much s just moving their tail quickly. Like I said, a reflex, not a plan.