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

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: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.

Much more importantly

[OSUJoe]

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

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

[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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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:Actually, vegetables do scream when picked

[Soylent Beige]

What's the worst thing about eating vegetables?

The wheelchairs.

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.

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?