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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

#231

Post by jojobas »

lanevorockz wrote: post #213
BeeBoBub wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not really the argument monkeybutton is making, the point is lobsters’ neural complexity is similar to ants, and orcas are comparable to humans.

It’s still a gradation, “as complex” is obviously a stretch. The whole argument is silly, soon turning off my Deep Learning algorithms because they are more complex than lobster.

500 years ago the argument that black people should have rights was just as silly.

We'll live to see some sort of AI rights protection laws.

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

#232

Post by goatlover »

xvilka wrote: post #145
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...

Even something small as jumping spiders can be quite smart. They certainly deserve some respect. And live boiling is common for crustaceans. Terrible practice, sentient or not.

I don't go out of my way to kill insects, but if someone wants to boil insects for food, I'm not going to have any moral qualms with it. I don't see how crustaceans are much different.

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

#233

Post by goatlover »

slothtrop wrote: post #47
adamcharnock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I didn’t know that either. I should probably read into this in more detail…

Sentience is the capacity to experience sensations like pain or emotions. Insects have a nervous system and consequently feel pain, which makes them sentient. That doesn't appear to be the key metric we consider when culling/killing things, in the end. It's not clear that they have the capacity for "anguish", let alone understand it. The old practice of cooking crab and lobsters was to subject them to pain for a need…

> Insects have a nervous system and consequently feel pain, which makes them sentient.

I'm not so sure about this. To feel pain requires consciousness. Behavior is not consciousness. It often indicates it in animals like humans with complex nervous systems. But it's very unclear when we get to something with a few thousand neurons. They likely won't any of the neural correlates of consciousness that we do. If insects or crustaceans are conscious of anything, it's not the kind of consciousness we have.

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

#234

Post by yibg »

mojomark wrote: post #193
imgabe wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does being an “antelope” somehow justify being torn apart and eaten by a lion? Yeah actually, it does because lions eat antelopes and humans eat lobsters. Nature doesn’t owe any being an existence devoid of suffering.

Lions don't boil antelopes alive, nor do they reportedly tear them apart while they're alive, instead they suffocate or sever their necks before eating them [1]. (Note: I had a lobster role for lunch two days ago, and I love them. However, these findings give me pause on eating them further.) 1. https://www.krugerpark.co.za/Kruger_National_Park_Wildlife-t...

Not lions, but plenty of videos of Hyenas eating them alive.

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

#235

Post by goatlover »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #131
markstos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gran…

As opposed to a villager going to a butcher to get their meat? Are we going to argue it's only moral to eat meat if you kill and butcher it yourself? Even the butcher probably isn't killing the animal. They're getting the carcass delivered to them.

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

#236

Post by phkahler »

adriand wrote: post #25
chrisweekly wrote: post #11

Crabs and lobsters are basically bugs, whereas an octopus is a creative, playful, intelligent creature with amazing capabilities. It seems strange to group them together.

I assume that Dr Jonathan Birch, Associate Professor at LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, and his team of scientists didn’t encounter this insightful perspective when they reviewed “over 300 scientific studies” in order to arrive at their conclusions… In seriousness though, this comment is a prime example of speciesism. Even if it were true that these crustaceans were “basically bugs” how doe…

>> the most basic consideration: that they have “the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm”.

Those crabs can dish out some pain with those pincers. They eat their prey alive too. That's not an argument for or against treating them some way, just that they aren't some poor innocent animals either.

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

#237

Post by Gwarzo »

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…

"I honestly believe that at some point, the majority of humans will look at our system of factory farming and “harvesting” of wildlife in much the same way that today we view slavery, colonialism and other egregious examples of human disregard for other lives. I am not saying they are the same thing, but I do think that they are in the same category.'

Do you believe that in our current world state we have some magical alternative we could use to feed the near 8 billion human beings that currently inhabit this planet?

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

#238

Post by junon »

sen wrote: post #140
monkeybutton wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Octopissies" doesn't exactly sound the best when said out loud...

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

#239

Post by WhompingWindows »

There's no reason to boil these creatures alive. Insert the knife into one key brain region and it's lights out, no more suffering instantly. Chefs can take 3 seconds to end their life with mercy, or they can throw a living creature into boiling water.

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

#240

Post by grozzle »

chimpansteve wrote: post #157
AussieWog93 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vegan argument is definitely a legitimate one, and not something I was trying to refute. A lot of meat eaters have these strange ideas about what is and isn't cruel (the classic being "hunting is evil but eating farmed meat is totally OK"), ostensibly based on reducing unnecessary suffering but also completely devoid of hands-on understanding of what actually happens. I will disagree with you on this point, thoug…

As someone who grew up on a small beef farm in the UK but is also very picky about the source of the meat he eats, my personal anecdotal experience is that vegan or meat eater, the problem is that the vast majority of people have never been within 100m of livestock, and have zero comprehension of where their food actually comes from or how it arrives in their nice refrigerated trays. The cows on my dad's farm probabl…

(I'm also from a farming and farm-vet family) Don't forget about the 98% of male calves and 99% of male chicks.

No matter how comfortable, even luxurious, a free-range eggs farm might be - all those hens' brothers were put in a shredder when they were newborns.

Examine the whole system, not the the visibly "best" parts.

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