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."

Comments

Actually, vegetables do scream when picked

[WillAffleckUW]

But you'd have to ask a vegetable if it feels pain.

Re:Actually, vegetables do scream when picked

[eln]

But you'd have to ask a vegetable if it feels pain.

I've tried. I ask them over and over again, and they never answer me. Eventually, I get kicked out of the hospital.

Re:Actually, vegetables do scream when picked

[WillAffleckUW]

You need to learn to whisper to them.

I find a mix of radish and arugula works. Most carrots can understand that.

Re:Actually, vegetables do scream when picked

[arekusu_ou]

Try Mandrakes, their screams will kill you

Re:Actually, vegetables do scream when picked

[ArsonSmith]

Why does Mandrake use ReiserFS?

Re:Actually, vegetables do scream when picked

[Soylent Beige]

What's the worst thing about eating vegetables?

The wheelchairs.

Does it matter...

[noirsoldats]

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..

Re:Does it matter...

[orclevegam]

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 think the point is more that it's traditional to kill most crustaceans in a decidedly nasty manner. In the case of crabs (and sometimes lobsters) they're boiled alive, and in the case of lobsters they're often ripped in half (tail end is twisted off while it's still alive). The issue here would be that if they can be demonstrated to feel pain (sort of assumed they do myself, most all animals do) then there would be a demand for them to be "humanely" killed prior to being cooked.

Re:Does it matter...

[Bloodoflethe]

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.

Re:Does it matter...

[DragonWriter]

if they feel pain? Cattle defiantly do, we still eat them.

Yeah, but that's just because of the defiance.

Re:Does it matter...

[Chosen Reject]

My wife and her family (Vietnamese) would disagree with you. They fill a large pot with live crabs and then turn on the burner; no butchering involved. If I remember correctly, the only water involved is whatever is left on the crab after they wash it off. And they'll eat just about the whole thing. I stick to just the legs myself.

Re:Does it matter...

[EkriirkE]

I can't speak for women, but I know it definitely feels good to me to be milked.

Oh, great.

[CelticWhisper]

The Crab People are not going to be happy about their weakness being discovered.

Much more importantly

[OSUJoe]

What about the pain I would experience not being allowed to eat sweet, delicious crab?

My bad...

[PolishPimpin]

I guess ill have to be careful when I pick them off my bush...

Required reading

[yali]

From David Foster Wallace's now-classic essay in Gourmet :

Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature's claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain...

There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider. One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with--nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior.

Re:Required reading

[EveryNickIsTaken]

The lobster might behave as we would, but I can guarantee you that the lobster is much, much tastier. Speaking of which, I think I need to go for some Lobsterfest tonite!

Re:Required reading

[HTH NE1]

There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider. One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with--nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior.

Except there's a third criteria: is the animal tasty enough to disregard the other two criteria.

Re:Required reading

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Required reading

[Anonymous Coward]

I have heard from those that eat bush meat that it is unlike anything else.

You're doing it wrong

Re:Required reading

[Kelbear]

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.

Re:Required reading

[publiclurker]

For a lobster, you can put a chef's knife through their head. That should be quick and painless enough. I've always done this. Mainly so I don't have to deal with boiling water and claws at the same time.

Re:Required reading

[SECProto]

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.

Re:Required reading

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I have a modest proposal that might interest you...

Re:Required reading

[praksys]

...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.

Re:Required reading

[HTH NE1]

Mmm... Popplers.

Re:Required reading

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

You can guarantee that the lobster is much, much tastier.

How many humans have you eaten? How did you cook them?
Perhaps you are using the wrong spices.

Re:Required reading

[pluther]

But...but...he heard the lid rattling!

What else could possibly cause the lid on the pot of boiling water with a lobster inside to rattle like that?

Re:Required reading

[harrkev]

Democrats too. The only difference is the babies that Republican politicians eat have been born first.

Re:Required reading

[Chosen Reject]

Obviously the water was in pain as it was thrashing about trying to get away from the heat source. That's not steam, those are the precious souls of billions of water molecules you just tortured and burned alive!!!

Re:Required reading

[The Grim Reefer2]

Except there's a third criteria: is the animal tasty enough to disregard the other two criteria.

That reminds me of something my daughter told me while driving past a cow field when she was 4 years old.

"Cows sure are cute daddy... It's too bad they taste so good. Can we have steak when we get home?"

Re:Required reading

[wrencherd]

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.

Re:Required reading

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Required reading

[thestallion]

I have to disagree. I dive for lobsters and will sometimes bring them from the bottom of the ocean to my kitchen in about 30 minutes. These are California Spiny Lobsters, can't speak for all the other species.

But some of them are particularly lively, and will definitely thrash for a few seconds in the boiling water. Much unlike the movement you might see if you put them into cold water. If it's sufficiently hot though, I think the shock kills them pretty quickly (about 5 seconds).

When you REALLY notice their apparent ability to sense pain is when you have to "clean" them, which involves shoving a long, barbed object (like a piece of their antennae) up their rectum, so you can pull out their intestine. They usually remain pretty calm as you handle them, even if you flip them over and touch the underside of their tail a bit. But the moment you try to jam that thing up their ass, the really lively/alert lobsters are sure to resist and flail about excessively. I truly think it is mighty unpleasant for them.

One time, I had one that was so effective at resisting the required cleaning, I was unable to get the job done. So I tried running it under hot water in hopes of killing it. Seeing as just being under the sink is nowhere near as fatal as being thrown into boiling water, I witnessed a lobster thrashing about, apparently in pain, from being held under such hot water. It did seem to shock him into compliance though after 20-30 seconds.

Anyway, I feel bad for the lobsters, and really dislike feeling as is I am causing them pain. In the future, I'm going to go with the knife-through-the-head method of killing, as recommended by one of my dive buddies (and someone earlier in this thread).

Re:Required reading

[_Sprocket_]

*holds up a glass of water*

BEHOLD! The Resurrection!

Re:Required reading

[vux984]

Your proof depends on the inference that lobsters feel no pain, based only on the assumption that robots feel no pain. You haven't proven anything.

Thank you captain obvious. That's precisely why I explicitly said I was making no actual judgement about lobsters. I was only showing the invalidity of "concluding something does feel pain" by looking at the cooking pot.

A suitably complex robot should theoretically experience something analagous to pain. I have no basis to assume your robot is not suitably complex. and especially if the heat it is trying to escape threatens its existence, I would say this is very analagous to pain.

My robot, was clearly described as a simple temperature sensor, with programmed response to preserve itself by moving away from inhospitable temperatures. This would mean it would likely thrash about in a cooking pot.

What's next, are you going to argue that cars feel 'pain' when their thermostats open, and the cars brains respond by taking steps to further regulate temperature, to protect the integrity of the engine...? Its absurd.

Furthermore, complexity of the AI or perception of threat level of is irrelevant.

You can put a human being into a room and start pouring water into it. As it gets deeper with no sign of stopping, the average person will quickly deduce that if the trend continues this situation threatens its existence and will seek an exit, and feel panic, etc. Suppose, we raise the water to neck level, and then drain it.

I'd hardly call anything the human experiences throughout the ordeal as pain.

but if this line of reasoning is sound, then we can take it all the way to the ultimate conclusion that pain itself does not exist and absolutely EVERYTHING is simply a dumb reflex.

You could at some bio-chemical-electrical level call everything a dumb reflex. However, some of these dumb reflexes map to what we think of as 'pain' and some don't.

The question is: Do crustaceans feel pain. And I don't know the answer.

But conflating "pain" with "behavior" is clearly absurd. My example robot feels no pain, even if its programmed to simulate it. My human example also feels no pain, even though it is "complicated AI" (no actually its straight up intelligent), with a presumed ability to feel pain. And is put in a situation that it deems is life threatening. I'm he'd feel a lot of things, but not pain.

You REALLY have to dig down and look at what crustaceans can sense, and how the information is processed/perceived in the brain before you can say they experience pain.

Humans experience pain. My example robot doesn't. Its conceivable some ultra sophisticated robot of the future could. And I don't know about crustaceans.

Re:Required reading

[meringuoid]

Have fun with your monster of a daughter. I'd flip out if I heard a kid so young say something like that.

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.

Re:Required reading

[badasscat]

Crustaceans are bugs. They have like 5 brain cells.

What difference does that make?

And did you actually read the article? Reflexes don't last for a lifetime. The part about the hermit crabs switching shells only if they'd been exposed to a painful stimuli in the past certainly suggests pain memory. The fact that crustaceans limp when exposed to painful stimuli is also pretty compelling evidence. There's no reason whatsoever to limp unless you feel pain - that's a pain-induced protection response, not an aversive reflex.

The whole point of the article is that we've assumed crustaceans don't experience pain because they don't have a neocortex in their brains, which is where we experience pain. But that just means they don't experience it by the same mechanism we do, not that they don't experience it at all. (Since you apparently didn't read the article, they use vision as another example of something lobsters have that's processed in a manner completely different from humans.)

Re:Required reading

[FatdogHaiku]

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.

I understand your point of view, however, here is video proof of a crustacean performing risk/reward analysis and as a result taking assertive action in order to prolong it's life!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVJAAhoYrw

Re:Required reading

[alemaco]

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.

Re:Required reading

[AGMW]

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.

I've heard that you can get the tiger to leave you alone if you grab some shit from behind you and throw it at the tiger. I am also reliably informed that there will be shit available as required.

Re:Required reading

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

>>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.

I would argue that it is probably not humane. My mother-in-law once put a fresh crab in the freezer, based on the same logic. However the next day when she retrieved it (I was a witness to this; I am vegetarian whereas she is not) the crab was still moving. It was still alive, and whilst the extremities were frozen, it was clearly awake and presumably in some level of pain (I've never had frostbite, but according to wikipedia there is some level of pain involved).
 
I was not able to gauge how much pain (if any) it was in, but if crustaceans do suffer from pain due to frostbite then this would be a very cruel way to treat them since they appear to remain "awake" for some time as the extremities freeze up.

Newsflash

[dtml-try MyNick]

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.

Re:Newsflash

[Chris Burke]

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.

Or how crabs are treated by their natural predators. I saw a documentary about arthropods once where a very large octopus was hiding in a crack in some rocks and grabbed a passing crab. The crab was too big to fit through the crack especially with its fat claw arms, so without actually leaving its hiding place the octopus used its other arms to tear the limbs off the crab so it'd fit through and the octo could then eat the crab alive.

Nature can be nasty.

On the other hand, I'm completely against eating octopi and squid because they are extremely intelligent, the dolphins or chimps of the invertebrate world as far as I'm concerned. Maybe not the tiny arthropods, sure, just personally I prefer not to encourage the trade at all so I don't eat any of them.

Re:Newsflash

[Dread_ed]

"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.

Scary

[DavidR1991]

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 :(

Re:Scary

[SatanicPuppy]

Dude, it's sitting around in heavy armor. There aren't a whole lot of options.

But, say I agreed with you. The first thing I'd have to do is go out and kill all their natural predators, because, obviously, a minute in boiling water beats the crap out of being slowly picked to death, or being digested alive, or being picked up and repeatedly dashed against rocks.

Most organisms end their lives in blinding pain. Death usually isn't fun.

Re:Scary

[bgeer]

Do you know how cows digest grass? Cows (and virtually all other mammals) lack a critical enzyme to break down the main nutrient in grass, cellulose. They get around this by hosting trillions of bacteria in their guts which are able to produce cellulase. The bacteria gorge on the cellulose the cow brings into its stomach(s), and convert it to glucose and energy for their own use. The cow then betrays them moving them to a later portion of their digestive tract where these bacteria are killed and broken down to nourish the cow.

Bacteria react to injury, they remember the past, and they even predict the future. If you buy into the theory that causing pain is immoral then every cow is a walking Auschwitz. (not even to mention the problem of brushing teeth)

By the way, there is no philosophical reason why "it feels pain" is a better standard for deciding whether injuring something is cruel than any other arbitrary standard, see Hume

Re:Scary

[DavidR1991]

"If you buy into the theory that causing pain is immoral then every cow is a walking Auschwitz"

The necessity of causing pain was the key point in my argument - I didn't say pain was completely wrong

Bacteria passing through a cow's gut / digestive system is a natural process that the cow itself has no control over, and hence the necessity of it is irrelevant - it's going to happen regardless. The same cannot be said for a lobster boiling in a pot.

Re:The difference between...

[jamie]

My "vegetarian" sister and her child say that they refuse to eat meat, then they will turn around and gobble down a fish or some shrimp. ... A lot of these "But I'll Eat Fish!" vegetarian people are giant hypocrites.

Yes. Actual vegetarians are often annoyed by pescetarians who incorrectly label themselves as vegetarians.

They reflect badly on the rest of us, as people sometimes jump to conclusions and assume all or most vegetarians are hypocrites. But they also dilute the term itself, to the point where some restaurants and food service workers come to believe that if someone identifies as a vegetarian, it's okay to feed them fish products. That's unfair.

Obviously they feel pain...

[Baba Ram Dass]

..if you define pain as a physiological response to damaging stimuli. Animals need that in order to survive.

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).

This problem is at root a philosophical one. It's impossible to know how things are through the eyes of another. See qualia. I don't know what red looks like to you, nor do I know how a flame touching your finger feels like to you. I can guess, because we have similar physical and mental faculties, but it's still just a guess.

Re:Obviously they feel pain...

[LateArthurDent]

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.

Re:Simple solution

[SatanicPuppy]

Did you know if you dump some instant grits on a fire ant mound the workers will take them in and feed them to the queen, and that she will then die as they slowly expand in her body, leaving her foul spawn to wither and die leaving an empty hellmound full of nothing but silence and despair?

Good stuff.

Incidentally, they kill scallops the same way as lobsters: by dumping them in boiling water. It's quick, and about as humane as it gets for something that can't otherwise be killed without wasting the meat.

Study shows crabs avoid electrical shocks

[Dan East]

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.

Re:About as surprising

[johnsonav]

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.

Re:Weak point

[Cornflake917]

If the scientists played any Final Fantasy games, they would know that casting "Lightning" on crabs hurts them, and hurts them much more than fire spells. ...Damn, you can tell when it's late afternoon on Friday when I start making retarded posts like these.

Suffering

[Twillerror]

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.

Re:Suffering

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Empathy is not a valid way of knowing if a creature suffers. Empathy requires a more sophisticated world view, so to speak. Just because a crab isn't smart enough to know what is happening to another crab, no reason to think it doesn't suffer when something is happening to itself.

Re:Simple solution

[mmontour]

Did you know if you dump some instant grits on a fire ant mound the workers will take them in and feed them to the queen, and that she will then die as they slowly expand in her body,

I've been reading Slashdot for many years and I've seen a lot of comments about grits, but that one's new to me.

simplistic solution

[Onymous Coward]

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.

Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gourmand

[mkcmkc]

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.

Re:About as surprising

[John Betonschaar]

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?

Re:Carrot Juice Is Murder

[Hognoxious]

Was the original divided into lines?