In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by chr1 » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #4

It's at this point you'd probably want to go read David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider The Lobster", an assignment he took from (I shit you not) Gourmet Magazine, which begins with a sort of Illinois Country Fair style travelogue from the Maine Lobster Festival and "ends", if you can call the back 2/3rds of an essay "ending", in a discussion of the meaning of pain and its applicability to the specific nervous syste…

What is worse, causing pain or killing?

If we consider an extreme case of someone going through a horrible torture, but the next day waking up as healthy as before, and without some kind of mental illness, and without losing significant amount of his time, or opportunity, would it be any different than a game? Would most people try such a game, where they play for someone getting executed in middle ages?

My guess is they would, so fear of the pain is misplaced, and death is the horrible part. And therefore killing painlessly doesn't let one off the hook, since it is still killing. (And if one thinks killing is ok, then some amount of pain should be ok too.)

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

#42

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:49 PM UTC

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #32

jjeaff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sometimes when I hear people talk about how we kill animals inhumanely, I feel like they should watch a little bit of national geographic. Makes a sketchy slaughterhouse seem like a picnic.

This is a dangerous route to take, because at that point you can start comparing yourself to animals. We spent a few centuries developing our world, so I think it's fair to assume higher standards. Animals kill other animals to solve their hunger and they do their best to end it quickly.

"Animals kill other animals to solve their hunger and they do their best to end it quickly." is not entirely true.

Many animals will start to eat others without bothering to kill them; non-carnivorous birds will peck each other (not particularly quickly) to death, dolphins do gang rape for fun while having the ability to understand what it means, they also kill things like porpoises for fun (they can't eat porpoises and they're neither a threat nor competition to dolphins); predators in good conditions do "surplus kill" i.e. kill just for practice/fun without attempting to eat the victim, apes have been observed to eat parts of other apes while they're still alive, etc, etc.

The main difference between animals is that while less intelligent animals will sometimes simply kill things "just because" even if they don't need to and the suffering will be an accidental side effect, the more intelligent animals will sometimes intentionally hurt/torture others. Morality is orthogonal to intelligence. Romanticizing nature as something pure, "taking only what they need" and beyond evil is ridiculous idealism that doesn't reflect reality.

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

#43

Post by derefr » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

Eyas wrote: post #40

derefr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 increas…

The Philosophy around procreation is still much debated, but my understanding is that positive utilitarians generally do not believe that _creating_ more lives is necessarily morally good. While death is often seen as vastly negative (or infinitely, depending on who you ask), positive utilitarians typically reject the idea that procreating more / having more children increases total utility.

Yeah, the simple act of creating the life doesn't have utility in any interpretation, I think; people just talk about the utility of procreation as a sort of Net Present Value on the projected utility that life will experience. Under positive utilitarianism, all lives either experience positive or zero utility, so it's never a net negative to have more of them.

Most positive utilitarians further posit that all [evolved, rather than maliciously-engineered-for-the-sake-of-cruelty] lives likely contain at least a little happiness/reward/satisfaction (positive utility), and since the unhappy moments just axiomatically have zero utility, rather than negative utility, all [evolved] lives should "sum up" to being worth creating from their own perspectives—though creating additional lives might make marginal global utility go down, for Malthusian reasons (ten starving wolves that each live for a year aren't don't have as much utility as one well-fed wolf that lives for ten years.)

Personally, I don't like positive utilitarianism very much—but it's important to understand, since it seems to be the intuitive stance a lot of (often religious, but not always) people have without realizing it.

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

#44

Post by dvtv75 » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #18

watwut wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural death of an animal in the nature can be quite long and very painful. The point is not to simulate natural kill, the point is to kill the animal without torturing it unnecessary.

Yes, sometimes when I hear people talk about how we kill animals inhumanely, I feel like they should watch a little bit of national geographic. Makes a sketchy slaughterhouse seem like a picnic.

I went on a tour through a slaughterhouse when I was a teen, as part of a school trip. Didn't want to go, but my stepfather decided that it would be "good for" me. I made it clear I didn't want to go and he laughed. He loved the power trip of forcing me to watch animals be killed.

It really messed me up. I won't eat red meat mostly as a result of this, but also because my family were also ridiculously poor cooks. (They were so bad that you wouldn't believe it.)

The smell of the animal fat has stuck with me for nearly thirty years, I can even smell it overpowering the fragrance of perfumed soap. Hand sanitizer, pump soap, and vegetable based soap are fine, but if I have to use ordinary animal soaps, the smell reminds me of what I saw.

I watched a cow be electrocuted, "stunned" they called it. The guide told me that it didn't feel anything because it was in a deep state of shock.

Ever been shocked by a cattle electric fence? When I was 9, I was. You can't move immediately afterward because of the shock of the event, and when the second blast hits you it hits really hard. I felt three of those, it was only when the third struck that I could move, and have no doubt that they were agonizing.

Shocking an animal to stun it, so you can slit its throat and let it die painfully while you dismember it, is no happy little picnic for the beast. This is no easy, painless death. I'm sure it would be agonizing and drawn out over several minutes, and by the time the animal recovers from the shock enough to express its suffering, it's already in pieces and can't.

Roll on lab-grown meat.

Side note: not completely relevant, but I have been attacked by a dog, and I was in shock through that as well. The worst injuries really hurt, but the adrenaline from the attack made me able to get away from the dog. The minor skin injuries I couldn't feel, because the pain centers were being overwhelmed by the worse ones. Between this, and the cattle electric fence, I'm sure they suffer.

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

#45

Post by chongli » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #32

jjeaff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sometimes when I hear people talk about how we kill animals inhumanely, I feel like they should watch a little bit of national geographic. Makes a sketchy slaughterhouse seem like a picnic.

This is a dangerous route to take, because at that point you can start comparing yourself to animals. We spent a few centuries developing our world, so I think it's fair to assume higher standards. Animals kill other animals to solve their hunger and they do their best to end it quickly.

Animals kill other animals to solve their hunger and they do their best to end it quickly.

Not always. Weasels and their relatives engage in surplus killing. Cats regularly play with their prey, clawing them and batting them around for fun, many times without even eating the dead prey animal.

Dolphins are known to devour a shark's liver and leave the rest of the animal to sink, dying a slow death.

Humans are animals. There's almost nothing we do that other predators don't. The difference is that we use technology as a force multiplier of overwhelming magnitude. There isn't much difference in kind, however.

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

#46

Post by bernardino » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

miles wrote: post #19

tptacek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to do with the fact that lobsters (according to Wallace) have decentralized nervous systems consisting of ganglia wired in series, so that slicing through one of them might not disable the creature's nociception upon being immersed in boiling water. You might just be keeping it from flailing around, paralyzed but still "aware" in whatever sense a lobster is aware of anything. Dave Arnold, another favorite writ…

> Dave Arnold, another favorite writer of mine, has a solution to this problem: clove oil anesthetizes lobsters (and fish). Clove oil, knife through the head, then boil. Or, you know, don’t kill them. Not sure why this idea is still considered extreme. Why harm fellow creatures when it is simply unnecessary? As Tolstoy wrote[1], "A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats me…

While I still eat meat, etc, at times I do think about what kind of suffering animals, etc, go through. I often come to the conclusion that we should just let them be - their lives, much like ours, are short-lived, and they deserve their little piece happiness.

All this reminds me of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher - a great read.

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

#47

Post by theoh » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

Eyas wrote: post #35

david38 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things aren't necessary. Eating lots of meat, sex without intent to procreate, travel. They sure are fun!

The gp is still pointing out that causing suffering to other creatures is a downside of eating meat. While all items you listed are not necessary, only one of them has that downside. Unless one argues with the premise that the killing/pain of other creatures is harmful, we'll only be talking past one another.

Not sure about the meaning of your second paragraph, but in theory, animals bred for human consumption could live happy lives up to the point of a painless, instant death. The issue becomes whether they would be missed by other animals.

Some would consider this a dangerous way of thinking, but someone like Temple Grandin would agree, I think, that the correct thing to worry about is suffering, not 'harm' in some abstract sense.

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

#48

Post by watwut » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

josephorjoe wrote: post #38

endymi0n wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rent-A-Guinea Pig Service Takes Off in Switzerland http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hope-for-lonely-...

Lol that is awesome. Thanks for the link. I feel for the poor introverted guinea pigs of Switzerland though. No chance for a peaceful quiet life free from the squeaking of another pig.

Human introverts still go crazy in solitary cell. It is kinda the same.

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

#49

Post by andrewwharton » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

The common procedure I was taught when growing up was chilling the crayfish (stick it in the freezer until it goes to sleep) before killing it [1]. It really takes very little effort and make no discernible difference whatsoever to the end result.

It's interesting that this method wasn't one of those listed, because I was under the impression that it was quite effective.

[1] http://kb.rspca.org.au/What-is-the-most-humane-way-to-kill-c...

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

#50

Post by smoe » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

The article does not do that good a job at explaining what the law going into affect first of March actually says.

The law extends compulsory stunning ("Betäubungspflicht") before killing, already in effect for vertebrates to certain types of crustaceans. So the lobsters will likely be still alive when thrown into boiling water but stunned with e.g. electric shock.

Also the media frenzy causing lobster issue is only a part of new legislation aiming to improve conditions of animals held as pets, for sport, in laboratories or to be eaten.

https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/standard/Hummer-muessen...