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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

#571

Post by createunderrate »

adriand wrote: post #29
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...

By this logic, humans should be given only half the consideration we give to orcas, which according to the resource you posted, have twice the neurons we do.

The ratio of neuron count to body size is the important measurement. An orca might have twice the neurons, but those extra neurons go toward motor control, not experiencing suffering and contemplating mortality.

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

#572

Post by slothtrop »

goatlover wrote: post #233
slothtrop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why I'm making a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is physiological, insects have the neurological capacity for it. Whether that translates to "anguish" in a conscious sense, that is unclear. So too would it be for lobster and crab. The problem is it's not possible to have an accurate gauge of consciousness, capacity for which. We ballpark either a lot or a little, you can't really say there's "nil". So how much does it take before it matters? Really we just intuitively approach insects differently.

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

#573

Post by chrisweekly »

bee_rider wrote: post #204
colechristensen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt a spider is as smart as me. Perhaps a contrived problem solving test proves a certain kind of spider is good at solving a certain kind of problem, but I really doubt I’d be the same with a brain as complex as a spider.

Of course they aren't comparable to humans, but some spiders are amazingly clever. For example, Portia spiders, which hunt other spiders, will apparently try different ways of manipulating the target's web, observe the target's behavior, and then adapt their manipulations to trick the target. The link below has a giant picture of a spider, so although it is an adorable Portia, if anyone has arachnophobia they shouldn…

Speaking of Portia spiders: If you haven't read Adrian Tchaikovsky's award-winning novel "Children of Time", you're in for a treat. Highly recomended.

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

#574

Post by patagonia »

toolz wrote: post #538
patagonia wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wouldn’t be willing to “experience” the same set of experiences and pains via a similar subset of your sensory system and brain in exchange for the benefit of a meal that could have been cruelty free, then you shouldn’t. The burden of proof should not be on others to prove to you via rationalization/ intellectualization that it’s not a nightmare of an end to a sentient creature’s life experience.

I find this line of thinking somewhat short sighted. Animals in the wild will almost certainly die more agonizing deaths than they would at the hands of humans. Would you rather a cannibal kill you with one cut to the throat or would you rather be killed by a polar bear that might even enjoy watching you writhe in pain for 10s of minutes before you ultimately pass out from either the excruciating pain or loss of bloo…

“…might enjoy watching you writhe…” I’ve seen no evidence that polar bears enjoy watching their prey suffer. Since you are broadening the scope of the argument then let’s talk about how we raise almost all animals that make it to our plates. The process is meant to be economically efficient and has the minimum legal required considerations for the animals welfare between birth and death. It’s not just about their suffering when killed. It’s about the suffering from birth to death.

Let’s broaden it further. Human’s system for producing meat has an insane amount of harmful externalities. The polar bear fits into an ecosystem that generally find balance.

Not to mention, straw man. You can’t sidestep the question as to whether it is moral to kill an animal a certain way by making a weak argument as to how they might have had it worse.

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

#575

Post by toolz »

afiori wrote: post #567
toolz wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this line of thinking somewhat short sighted. Animals in the wild will almost certainly die more agonizing deaths than they would at the hands of humans. Would you rather a cannibal kill you with one cut to the throat or would you rather be killed by a polar bear that might even enjoy watching you writhe in pain for 10s of minutes before you ultimately pass out from either the excruciating pain or loss of bloo…

I like to pose this as not empathy for the animal but empathy for ourselves* It is not nice to the kind of colture that inflict pain on an indutrial scale and we can empathise with the torture that is mutilation and being boiled alive, does not need to be about what an octupus feels during slaughter, it can be about how to approach the act itself. I believe that buddhism teaches to pay respect or thank the lifes that…

I would suggest lobster tastes worse when boiled alive. Any animal that has an endocrine system is likely to taste worse when boiled alive. My understanding is that adrenaline rush caused by immense stress eat up the glycogen stores in muscles which in turn prevents the production of lactic acid to tenderize the meat postmortem. I can't imagine this would be any different in lobsters than basically every other animal.

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

#576

Post by patagonia »

There are a lot of comments asking for vegans to explain themselves and their choices. Vegans are not doing something. If I sit in a chair quietly in a room and another person in the room is running around breaking stuff because “it’s enjoyable” and “the stuff can’t feel any pain” I doubt you’d ask me, the person sitting quietly in their chair, to explain myself. Meat eaters with no concern for animal welfare or environmental concerns need to be doing the explaining.

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

#577

Post by jillesvangurp »

sorokod wrote: post #432
jillesvangurp wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. We simply classify animals by how much we can relate to them. Seals, sheep, dogs, etc. are cute. Lobsters, not so much. Most insects even less so. To the point where we are reluctant to eat them even though they are perfectly nutritious. They all have nervous systems, pain reflexes, etc. A counter argument is that absolutely everything in nature at some point dies and it tends to be unpleasant. Dying of o…

Nature can be cruel and we're part of nature But we (humans) do exclude ourselves from being part of nature like that. If you believe that this is morally correct, how would you define the general criteria for this exclusion?

I don't actually believe that; but I can't speak for everyone of course and obviously many of us think we're pretty special. I think the distinction is not that helpful though. I think the issue is actually us projecting our own subjective morals and values rather selectively, very subjectively and a bit inconsistently.

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

#578

Post by willis936 »

bumby wrote: post #512
willis936 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claim of lobsters not being able to feel pain is wishy-washy because it's a convenient assumption based off of an oversimplification. "Invertebrates don't feel pain because they lack the specific machinery mammals use to experience pain". If you just stop there then yes, it does seem silly to worry about a thing that doesn't exist. However, what I've seen of the models suggests that we are far away from being ab…

We can’t yet even define consciousness so of course we don’t have a “good” model. But using our current understanding of the “machinery” makes more sense to me than basing the decision on whatever it is you’re vaguely referring to, otherwise I don’t see what stops one from going to full Jainism. If our understanding of that machinery changes so will my opinion. You haven't really given much rationale beyond "they see…

It costs us nothing to admit what we don't know and reserve our judgments until we do. Are you arguing that we not?

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

#579

Post by omnicognate »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #569
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…

Wasn't simulation done? https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation

That's a simulation based on the connectome and a trivially simple body, producing a very small piece of behaviour. I don't mean to minimise it, it's very cool and I'm not an expert. The video itself says that it is limited.

As I understand it, C. Elegans displays a surprisingly large and complex set of behaviours given its (relatively) extremely simple nervous system. A database of thousands of these "behavioural phenotypes" has been built and provides a well-defined goal for attempts to reproduce the behaviours in simulations. Very few of these behaviours have been replicated. To solve the problem will apparently require a lot more than the connectome, which has been known for a long time. It's not enough to know that neuron A connects to neuron B, or even the full 3D structure of that connection. You need to know how that connection influences the behaviour of the connected neurons. People refer to this as "knowing the weights" but AFAIK it's still an open question whether a model based on "weights" is sufficient.

This is a recent comment from one of the researchers about progress on this over the last 10 years: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-b...

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

#580

Post by q1w2 »

drewg123 wrote: post #550
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,…

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...

General anesthetic has been shown to cause brain damage.

Surgery on infants without anesthetic has been shown to cause emotional differences in children.

There's no good solution. Doctors were weighing consequences with little data.

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