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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."
But you'd have to ask a vegetable if it feels pain.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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..
What about the pain I would experience not being allowed to eat sweet, delicious crab?
I guess ill have to be careful when I pick them off my bush...
From David Foster Wallace's now-classic essay in Gourmet :
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?