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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

#551

Post by Bud »

sweetheart wrote: post #481
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?

Millions of people draw the line at animals in general: vegans. We don't need to gerrymander the tree of life into edible and non-edible animals and pretend we have rational for the delineations if we just stop eating animals. Folks in developed countries don't need to eat animals to survive, so why bother? In the best case it allows us to eat some foods that taste unique and different, worst case it propagates unbel…

I see what you are trying to say, but this isn't what "gerrymander" means.

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

#552

Post by ChrisRR »

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...

How often do you boil ants alive for food?

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

#553

Post by y4mi »

Lhiw wrote: post #449
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify. This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental g…

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.

> Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

I'm not a vegan but from my perspective if minimizing harm is your goal then veganism is the only valid choice.

Any meat consumption will unquestionably increase the misery and pain the consumed animals had. Both while alive and at their final end. You're lying to yourself if you cannot admit to that.

Your argument wrt the insects and land animals is super strange too... What do you think the animals are going to eat until they're butchered? Love and good feelings?

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

#554

Post by afiori »

stickfigure wrote: post #428
omnicognate wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by "interestingly complex". To say we are nowhere near understanding the nervous systems of fruit flies would be a massive understatement. Even for C.Elegans, for which we know the complete connectome and much more besides (and which has a thousandth of the number of neurons a fruit fly does), we're not close to explaining (or simulating) the behaviour of the animal in terms of the properties o…

Are you suggesting I should feel bad about squishing fruit flies?

It might be nice not to slowly boil them alive

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

#555

Post by delecti »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #483
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still enough to feel being boiled alive.

Maybe. More broadly the issue here is that crabs and lobsters (and in East Asia often fish and all seafood) are sold alive because of freshness and quality considerations. So, IMHO the only way to enforce a ban on boiling lobsters alive is to ban selling lobsters alive and to create a whole raft of requirements similar to the slaughter of animals. In the article that's the proposal: " It recommends against ... the sa…

> It's the slaughter that is controlled

Practically speaking, most people buying a lobster for home cooking treat it as "ready to cook" the same as they would a mutton steak from that same grocer. So I think the different treatment makes sense.

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

#556

Post by sweetheart »

Bud wrote: post #551
sweetheart wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions of people draw the line at animals in general: vegans. We don't need to gerrymander the tree of life into edible and non-edible animals and pretend we have rational for the delineations if we just stop eating animals. Folks in developed countries don't need to eat animals to survive, so why bother? In the best case it allows us to eat some foods that taste unique and different, worst case it propagates unbel…

I see what you are trying to say, but this isn't what "gerrymander" means.

I know :) But its a useful visual metaphor

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

#557

Post by Enginerrrd »

akudha wrote: post #498
Yizahi wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is - lobsters are an easy problem. We can (theoretically) collectively decide that lobsters shouldn't be touched at all and nobody will be hurt (some fishers maybe?). But the same logic about "feeling" pain is applicable to practically anything as is demonstrated in the comments below. And then it becomes a humanity problem - can we kill living organisms for ANY reason? There is no easy, or even hard answer…

Killing is one thing, Killing by boiling alive is on a whole another level of cruelty, like unit 731 level, nazi level cruelty. I don’t eat meat, so I don’t know why only lobsters are boiled alive and not other sea food. Whatever the reason, it is hard to justify. If we are going to kill something, the least we could do is kill it painlessly. At the beginning of COVID-19, some farm in the Midwest killed hundreds of p…

Serious question here... but, are you sure that's a cruel method of killing lobsters? (I'm 100% with you on the pigs but here me out on the lobsters.)

I think when you're evaluating killing methods based on how humane they are, one thing to keep in mind is that how something looks to the executioner is NOT a good metric. As an example: Consider the oft repeated anecdote about how being hanged is only "humane" if you break someones neck during the hanging. If you don't, the subject with jerk and spasm wildly. HOWEVER... I have been choked out in jiu-jitsu.... it's like going to sleep. However, I can only imagine the uncommunicateable horror of having my neck broken and then having to endure 2 minutes of consciousness before I succumb to not breathing and pass out. One looks distressing but is suffering-free. One looks great, but is probably terrifying.

For a lobster, there are a couple of metrics I'd be concerned with: - time experiencing a sense of alarm - time experiencing what is likely pain

If I take a lobster, and I suddenly plunge them into fully boiling water, full submerged, how long do you think it is before they succumb? Keep in mind, that movement isn't necessarily a good cue here, because the physical structures will move in response to heat even if consciousness is long gone. Smaller animals have a high surface area to volume ratio. The heat transfer is likely pretty fast. I have experience cooking dungeness crabs, and I can say from experience, the time between putting them in the water and when they stop moving entirely is quite quick... I'd say no more than ~5-10 seconds. The last part of that movement seems uncoordinated as well so may not represent conscious effort.

For lobsters, would you prefer they be decapitated first? There's likely some consciousness that will remain for a similar time period in the head, so you should probably behead them, AND plunge the head into boiling water. BUT... then you also have to consider the "time experiencing alarm"... Wrestling them still to behead them will undoubtedly be alarming.

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

#558

Post by Frondo »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #527
yawaworht1978 wrote: post #317

Yes ,don't cook lobsters alive I would say. Most animals can definitely feel pain, maybe even insects. Don't cause them unnecessary pain. It's pretty said that the so called most intelligent animal species needs laws to understand that.

But they taste good with garlic butter. That is both true and an incredibly lame argument when I write it out. I have strong feelings about octopuseses and the people who eat them for entertainment. I wish we knew how sentient and pain-aware lobsters are.

Parent said "don't cook them alive," not "don't cook them."

It's not hard to kill a lobster before you drop it in the pot - slip a knife into its neck above its carapace. This was a test on one of those Gordon Ramsay shows, so if he can kill them first and still make tasty food, I think we all can.

But really, if there were an animal that I could only eat by inflicting pain on it first (i.e. causing pain and not striving to minimize its suffering), I wouldn't eat it.

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

#559

Post by afiori »

y4mi wrote: post #553
Lhiw wrote: post #449

Earlier 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.

> Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does. I'm not a vegan but from my perspective if minimizing harm is your goal then veganism is the only valid choice. Any meat consumption will unquestionably increase the misery and pain the consumed animals had. Both while alive and at their final end. You're lying to yourself if you cannot admit to that. You…

In my opnion focusing on ethical farming is more promising (under an utilitarian perspective).

If the focus is to reduce suffering and exploitation of animals the best action is to ban the most cruel practices by law pushing stricter ethical standards.

People will continue to eat meat everywhere they can afford it (maybe less, maybe more) veganism is not going to change that.

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

#560

Post by GoblinSlayer »

koalafied wrote: post #546

I’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,…

I even think harm is as harmful for plants as it is for animals.
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