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I like jokes but all jokes aside Jordan Peterson’s material helped me get off of opiates
Hilarious considering his benzo addiction nearly killed him.
Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
541–550 of 704 posts
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#542What does this mean in practice? By this definition, surely normal farm animals are sentient, but they are eaten, experimented on and frightfully frequently abused, so... what’s the change?
Probably "not much".
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably, intelligence entails understanding that suffering can take forms other than the immediately obvious ones, and taking steps to minimize it if possible.
I’m aware that it may feel pain either just like I do, or in a different way. My question is why should I be agitated by this thought, iow what is the reason to reduce it. I don’t relate its suffering to my “soul” or a mental state. Not talking about morals here, I wouldn’t boil a live crab in a presence of people who would react negatively. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29305117
Your line of questioning gives me the shivers, because it applies equally to humans. You might be intellectually aware that you're causing someone to suffer, but - unless someone else is watching - why should you care?
You say you're "not talking about morals" - what, then, are morals?
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#544Extracts from the LSE report summary:
Recommendations relating to specific commercial practices
- Declawing. We have high confidence that declawing (removing one or both of the claws from a crab before returning it back to the water) causes suffering in crabs.
- Nicking. We also have high confidence that the practice of nicking (cutting the tendon of a crab’s claw) causes suffering and is a health risk to the animals.
- Wholesale and retail. We recommend a ban on the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers.
- Stunning. Current evidence indicates that electrical stunning with appropriate parameters for the species can induce a seizure-like state in relatively large decapods, and that stunning diminishes, without wholly abolishing, the nervous system’s response to boiling water. We interpret this as evidence that electrical stunning is better than nothing.
- Slaughter (decapods). We recommend that the following slaughter methods are banned in all cases in which a more humane slaughter method is available, unless preceded by effective electrical stunning: boiling alive, slowly raising the temperature of water, tailing (separation of the abdomen from the thorax, or separation of the head from the thorax), any other form of live dismemberment, and freshwater immersion (osmotic shock). On current evidence, the most reasonable slaughter methods are double spiking (crabs), whole-body splitting (lobsters), and electrocution using a specialist device on a setting that is designed and validated to kill the animal quickly after initially stunning it.
- Slaughter (cephalopods). Various different slaughter methods are currently used on fishing vessels in European waters, including clubbing, slicing the brain, reversing the mantle and asphyxiation in a suspended net bag. We are not able to recommend any of these methods as humane. On current evidence, there is no slaughter method for cephalopods that is both humane and commercially viable on a large scale.
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
We aren't needlessly torturing them? Seriously, you cannot see the difference between a person who delivers a single killing blow and then eats the animal and one who watches it boil to death over 20m or so? "Getting joy from inflicting pain" is very different to "killing for food".
Lobsters & crabs are risky to eat unless they are very fresh (i.e. they have not been dead for too long). If you buy a dead lobster and then cook it, you have much less assurance about when it died hence the freshness than with a live lobster. If you buy a live lobster, how are you going to practically kill it before boiling it? Try to penetrate the hard shell to impale the brain using a layperson's skills and equipm…
Perhaps it would be best if the fishmonger or grocery store seafood department worker were to pith it for you at time of sale. They can have proper training and safety equipment (a sharp knife and a cut-resistant glove), and you get an assurance of time of death.
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#546I’m a bit surprised by the number of comments here basically saying if we can’t logically prove that X feels pain, then it’s fine to do whatever with it, or that if we don’t know exactly where the line should be drawn, then there’s no line to be drawn at all.
Do you all always behave according to well-defined rules within a consistent logical system?
I don’t think you can prove to me that you or your pets feel pain, so what would be the logical consequence of that?
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, my tendon in my knee can "react" to "negative stimuli" when a doctor strikes it with a rubber hammer. I guess the question is about how these words are being used, and whether they're referring to automatic biological reflexes or something like a conscious experience, sentience, or sapience, depending on how you use the terms.
Sentience always requires more than just reaction, but a memory component. That is, it can take a proactive response to avoid that negative stimuli in the future. However, measuring both of those is generally very difficult, and so determining if something is sentient can be difficult. The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that…
>However, measuring both of those is generally very difficult, and so determining if something is sentient can be difficult.
That makes sense. So then, we should probably be very cautious about statements that openly entertain such possibilities given that they may be hard to substantiate meaningfully.
>The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that there be consciousness.
Huh, every definition I've seen when I read about this stuff in college, and that I currently see when I google, explicitly relates in some way to consciousness. And anything that means "reaction" "sense" "detect" in a sense pertinent to sentience meant some kind of conscious sensing, conscious reacting. Did the definition change at some point?
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#548Even 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.
I eat shrimp and fish because I genuinely believe they are about as intelligent and sentient as a carrot. Octopuseses seem obviously intelligent. Lobsters I do not know. Likely not intelligent and I would stir fry ants. The question for me is how much pain they feel being boiled alive. I am being won over to the viewpoint that there is enough possibility that they feel pain similarly enough to how mammals do that boi…
I have never seen a carrot flee in terror from a threat, or flock eagerly towards a person that regularly feeds it, or curiously investigate a new structure in its habitat.
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a vegan how do you reconcile the thousands of insects and field animals that get culled during harvesting those lentils? I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random. Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.
Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly, since only about 9% of the food they eat is converted into edible flesh. So even if you take this argument seriously, the insects and field animals are better off if you grow fewer crops, which you accomplish by directly eating the crops you grow, not feeding them to livestock.
But you get 10 times the nutrition density from animal protein.
Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law
#550I’m a bit surprised by the number of comments here basically saying if we can’t logically prove that X feels pain, then it’s fine to do whatever with it, or that if we don’t know exactly where the line should be drawn, then there’s no line to be drawn at all. Do you all always behave according to well-defined rules within a consistent logical system? I don’t think you can prove to me that you or your pets feel pain,…
People didn't think human babies could feel pain until the 1980s[1], and commonly did operations w/o anesthetic.
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/when-doctors-start-using-anesthesia...