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Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

lse.ac.uk

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Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#131

Post by ClumsyPilot »

markstos wrote: post #41
adamcharnock wrote: post #4

Even as a meat eater I’m pretty shocked that this recognises them as sentient and yet does not ban their slaughter (aside from boiling them alive etc). Maybe I’ve read too much science fiction, but eating sentient beings seems Bad.

Some pigs register test for higher intelligence than dogs, but yet we eat those. Cows and chickens seem to feel pain as well. Where should we draw the line about which animals we eat and which we don't?

Do you think most city dwelling office workers in the first world would eat steak if they had to kill and butcher a cow themselves? I hazard a guess that half would faint at the sight of blood.

We have this meat industry that gides away all the nasty bits and we just get ouece of meat iwrapped in plastic. I have. No accusations against farmers doing what they have to do, but in the first world cities we have one grand hypocrisy

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#132

Post by aetherson »

justbaker wrote: post #104
ddulaney wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection” might also be overcorrection (meta-hypercorrection?) now that octopi is an understood plural with enough usage that it’s in some dictionaries.

Like sulfur becoming an accepted spelling of sulphur from frequent misspelling? “Okay no one can get it right so just make it that too”.

Yes. That's called language.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#133

Post by monkeybutton »

colechristensen wrote: post #119
ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Octopi is not the correct plural. Octopus is of greek origin, not latin. Thus, its greek plural is octopodes. And thus, since we don't tend to use greek plurals in english, the other proper plural is octopuses. Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection. "A hypercorrection is non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer wh…

This is English, not Latin or Greek. There’s no such thing as “correct” in language as long as you can be understood, especially for silly details like how to make a plural. You’ll find octopi in the dictionary because it is commonly used. Remember all words are made up anyway. If you’re not the editor of a publication making local standards for how you want to use language, it’s better not to correct people when the…

This is what it comes down to in the end. Words are memes, and the best replicating meme wins.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#134

Post by glenstein »

adriand wrote: post #72
stathibus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how use of the word "speciesism" implies that some place humans above other animals as a result of some kind of fallacy or irrational thinking, and not because we are humans and therefore more valuable to each other. Never mind the fact that we have consciousness and ego and complex nervous systems, whereas lobsters do not.

> not because we are humans and therefore more valuable to each other I value my children more than I value your children, but you will likely disagree with my assessment, even though it isn’t unexpected. And I would have to admit my assessment is not objective. > Never mind the fact that we have consciousness and ego and complex nervous systems, whereas lobsters do not. That’s how speciesism works: we try to find so…

>because they lack X they are not worthy of consideration. It’s okay if they suffer. This is precisely the same logic that was used to justify slavery, for example.

Wowzers, this is the most strawmanny characterisation of this view I think I've seen outside of scifi villains in B movies. I don't think the most charitable view is that species "deserve to suffer." It's that they have different capacities for suffering, and that differences in the complexity of the nociceptive and the nervous systems are inputs into our understanding when we try to figure this stuff out. That leads to, say, jellyfish being treated with different moral urgency than mammals, or eggs being treated differently than hatched birds.

The B-Movie scifi villian characterization also is problematic not just because of it's anti-intellectual shallowness, but also because it considers moral assessment in it's negative sense but not it's positive. Namely, that this is about tending to the needs and moral well-being in cases where the urgency in protecting it is greatest, and we can make good choices to do the most good. We make choices that prioritize the well-being and safety of our children in ways that take their well-being seriously, and we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building. To treat them equally, or to prioritize the other way around, would find someone facing the moral condemnation of the community as well as legal consequences, and nobody would be convinced to withhold those judgments by speeches about speciesism.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#135

Post by musingsole »

crehn wrote: post #91
stephc_int13 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I catch lobsters and crabs as a hobby, and this is something I started at a young age (5, small crabs). I killed and cooked countless of those creatures. There is absolutely no doubt that they experience pain and fear, like all animals and probably also many plants. From my experience, I don't think they suffer that much when boiled alive, they die in less than two seconds, it is very quick because of their low volum…

> they experience pain and fear, like [...] probably also many plants Out of curiosity, do you have any data to share that supports your perspective?

Yeah, their observations of their behavior over a history of catching and eating them.

Oh, you mean tabular, quantitative data? Come off it.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#136

Post by Kye »

ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #85
monkeybutton wrote: post #6

Octopi I understand, but lobsters? They have less than half the nervous system of an ant [1]. Are individual ants sentient and worthy of legislating over? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of...

Octopi is not the correct plural. Octopus is of greek origin, not latin. Thus, its greek plural is octopodes. And thus, since we don't tend to use greek plurals in english, the other proper plural is octopuses. Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection. "A hypercorrection is non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer wh…

I call them octopuppers.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#137

Post by ClumsyPilot »

systemvoltage wrote: post #43
coolandsmartrr wrote: post #32

David Foster Wallace once wrote an essay called "Consider the Lobster." He argued for the merciful eating of lobsters; rather than boil them alive, make their death instantaneous. How will the legal recognition change their treatment?

It is actually insane that there is so much violence in nature. Every minute, there are millions of living things dying – many with unimaginable pain. The evolutionary engine is absolutely merciless. If I want to be terrified, I think what if we, instead of at the top of the food chain, were just second. It terrifies me to no end.

"Top of the foodchain" is not where you think it is. Parasites that eat lions inside-out are at the top. Or the plague.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#138

Post by musingsole »

peanut_worm wrote: post #56
systemvoltage wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually insane that there is so much violence in nature. Every minute, there are millions of living things dying – many with unimaginable pain. The evolutionary engine is absolutely merciless. If I want to be terrified, I think what if we, instead of at the top of the food chain, were just second. It terrifies me to no end.

Boiling to death is pretty cruel even for nature. Getting eaten alive honesty doesn’t even sound as bad.

You'll die faster dropped into boiling water than watching over hours as bears eat your guts and then wander off once their sated.

I assure you, getting eaten alive is far worse than boiling to death.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#139

Post by bumby »

willis936 wrote: post #116
ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it is necessary. Pest control is inherent. We cannot allow mice, rats, etc to live in urban environments unchecked. Mice are sentient, does that mean we should only use no-kill traps and then release the mice somewhere far away? Many urban pests have population numbers that are 50-100X higher per square mile in the city than they could sustain in the countryside. So if we could even theoretically capture th…

To make it simpler: consider the lobster. It's not a pest yet still isn't considered above being boiled alive for no reason other than "that's what paw deid".

There is some thought backed neuroscience that lobsters can't feel pain in the human conception of it because of the lack of a neocortex. I don't know how well that can be tested, but it goes beyond justifying it because "that's what paw deid"

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#140

Post by sen »

monkeybutton wrote: post #128
dragonwriter wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Octopi is not the correct plural. Octopi is not the most common plural, true. > Octopus is of greek origin, not latin. Octopus entered English from scientific Latin. In which the Greek plural was not used. (Lots of words in English fron languages other than their language of origin and have irregular English forms from their immediate source rather than their remote origin.) “Octopi” appears to be the earliest Engl…

This is fascinating and instead of replying I've been reading about this and looking up words like cacti. For what it's worth, both plural forms for Octopus are in my phone's autocomplete dictionary.

The only real solution here is to make the official plural term be Octopises.
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