In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster

This has to do with the fact that we in Switzerland once voted (in the early 90s) to constitutionally recognize animals, and giving them dignity. The dignity of the creature it was called. This is the reason also why you are not allowed to own just one single guinea pig or a lovebird.

Why do you, and many contemporaries with you, doubt you'd be able to kill animals? Especially when apparently our ancestors had no such qualms. I venture this is a matter of exposure, we rarely see animals butchered. In fact, most animals we see are pets, contant with wildlife is very minimal.

So we recoil at killing animals, because pets are like family, and most of our experience with animals are with pets. Thus, we see animals as much more human than our ancestors.

What then, does this say about the ethical status of animals. Certainly, it seems like our lack of exposure to butchering is why we now care much more about animals. The issue would be much clearer if things had happened the other way around. That is, things would be clearer if we stopped all butchering animals because we thought animals had rights.

That is not to say this means animals have no rights, it might well be that by no longer killing animals as a manner of habit we realized their ethical standing. However, this is less evident than most other cases where we (the caucasian west) have given other groups more ethical standing.

With slavery, we first realized it was wrong, and then stopped having slaves. The counter point might be that in this analogy we are still before the point of abolishment.

I think all I can conclude is that 'not being able to kill animals' is not a sufficient arguments for animals having more ethical standing. In the end though, it might boil down to ethics not being absolute but instead being relative to culture.

Lots of things aren't necessary. Eating lots of meat, sex without intent to procreate, travel.

They sure are fun!

Question: what is the maximum water temperature that a lobster can survive in?

If that maximum is less than the boiling point of water, then another question: how carefully is the law drafted?

If the law actually specifies boiling, is it just going to result in cooks bring the water to a boil, taking it off the heat, letting it drop to a little below the boiling point, and then inserting the lobster, where it still dies but not as fast?

The only animals that don't generally die mostly from predation are those on top of whatever food chain they're a part of (bears, big cats, etc.) And we don't tend to eat those.

For the rest, if we aren't eating them, something else is going to eat them. It's not a question of "taking an animal life"—the animal's life is going to get taken, in a messy, bloody, terrifying way.

It is considered by some to be an increase in marginal global utility, when a human eats an animal that would otherwise have been eaten by something else. Because we cause less suffering in the process of (killing and) eating the animal, than anything else would have.

(I don't personally know how I feel about this argument, but I feel like I should put it out here, because it's not very well-known and usually causes more interesting discussion than the usual responses.)

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Also, as a bonus argument: if you're a positive utilitarian, then we increase global utility by a lot simply by raising livestock to eat them that would otherwise have never existed at all. (If you're a negative utilitarian, then all the good humanity has ever done is probably wiped out by the suffering of the great number of chickens we keep.)

Either way, though, it's indisputable that the life of e.g. a sheep kept by a shepherd, has higher total QALY than the life of a wild sheep. For some species, we're giving them a virtual garden-of-Eden to live in until they just, one day, die at our hands.

There's actually a part of the Effective Altruism movement that wants to reduce wild animal suffering—i.e. interject ourselves into nature in order to make more animal lives like that of the tended sheep (with or without the eventual culling.) I think they hope to use synthetic meat to solve the "how do you keep both the fox and the hen happy" problem.