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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

#601

Post by uxcolumbo »

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…

Animals in the wild are free, yes there are many dangers lurking around, but mostly they are free.

Animals in factory farms are not free and grow up suffering and the slaughter isn't humane at all.

So taking your mode of thinking, which one would you choose:

A) Mostly a free life out in nature with a potential painful death

B) Miserable life in factory farms where you go crazy with a painful death

Also, if there wouldn't be this insane level of demand for animal meat, we wouldn't have to breed animals.

And we are worse than the polar bear. Animals are being abused, mutilated tortured on a regular basis. Plus all the other damage our meat addiction causes, i.e. destruction of our biosphere and degrading working conditions for people having to work in those factory farms or slaughter houses.

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

#602

Post by harpersealtako »

xvilka wrote: post #175
musingsole wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Venturing into the wild without good weapon is not a smartest thing to do. The problem I'd that weapons that can quickly and effortlessly kill the bear are often unavailable to general public.

...ordinary medium-to-large caliber hunting rifles are unavailable to the general public?

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

#603

Post by phonypc »

robbrown451 wrote: post #172
phonypc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crabs and lobsters are basically bugs Not really. You might as well say humans are basically zebras.

"Bug," in its most common usage, is a large category that includes spiders, insects, and other arthropods. Crustaceans (which includes pill bugs a.k.a. roly polies) are arthropods. So I'm not seeing your zebra analogy.

If you want to expand the category "bugs" to include all arthropods, then "crabs and lobsters are basically bugs" is kinda circular/superfluous.

My comparison at that point would become "humans and zebras are basically chordates"... which is true but not very meaningful in context.

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

#604

Post by wander_homer »

imgabe wrote: post #568
wander_homer wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even…

Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance. > Yo…

> Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance.

No, we do the things people think are worth solving. In this case a team of scientists regarded a bill to be inconsistent with modern findings, hence they asked the government to keep up with modern science. The government, which was elected by the people, now did exactly that and made the bill more consistent with science.

And you still don't get it, no matter which problem you think is really important and really worth solving, someone will always be able to think of an even larger problem, which could be solved more efficiently. By this logic you're never going to do anything.

> Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter.

So what exactly are you asking for? Should those scientist, not work on the stuff they care about, but something more important instead? Should the government not listen to science? Or should the government not make their bills consistent? Should the government not introduce any bill at all for an issue, when someone can think of an even larger issue and who should that be?

> We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.

What costs does this action have and what would you have the people involved rather be doing?

Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action? Like the number of scientific findings alone, which first no one thought to be of any meaningful use and later revolutionized our lives in so many ways, is endless and none of them would have happened if you simply fund science by the most promising outcome.

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

#605

Post by msravi »

donatj wrote: post #287
msravi wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death... Those minutes/hours/days spent experiencing pain do count. You speak as of the after-effects but make it seem that an advantage in living the process itself doesn't count. That's like saying that we're all going to die anyway and there's no advantage to how we live our lives. So why bother with anything?

> living the process itself doesn't count What reason do you have to believe otherwise. What does it count towards ? What counts is in missed opportunity. Missed abilities to affect the world around you before you leave. Pain at the very end doesn't alter that much at all.

For all you know, the whole world around you might be a figment of your big and complex imagination, and nothing you do would, in the end, affect it. So what actually matters, (in fact the only thing that matters) is your perception of the world around you (and that includes pain).

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

#606

Post by phonypc »

fho wrote: post #584
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.

Funfact you didn't want to know today: Figs are technically not vegan (nor vegetarian) as during the (highly complex) pollination process some fig-wasps have a wild time in the fruit, where eventually some of the wasps die and get absorbed by the fruit.

The wasp is completely digested. You're no more eating a wasp when eating a fig, than you are eating grass when eating beef.

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

#607

Post by phonypc »

toolz wrote: post #575
afiori wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That stress / lactic acid / meat quality relationship only really applies to meat that's going to be aged, and it's as much about preventing microbial spoilage as anything.

There's no time for it to be a factor for lobster, which is going to be alive or frozen until right before you cook it.

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

#608

Post by phonypc »

ArchD wrote: post #474
lelanthran wrote: post #467

Earlier 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…

If you can't safely split a lobster with your kitchen knife, you probably shouldn't be cutting carrots either. It's not hard.

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

#609

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #308
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick search shows a lot of sites saying it takes about 3 minutes for death, though I don't know what the original source is. But that makes sense to me. I mean, how would boiling water cause instant death? Do you think if you were dunked in boiling water you would instantly die? Granted we don't have the same physiology as lobsters, but, what exactly is the physical mechanism that would cause instant death from 10…

>what exactly is the physical mechanism that would cause instant death from 100°C water I honestly don't know. I just know I chucked a yabby (small crayfish) in a pot and it died instantly. Larger ones might take a tiny bit longer, but I'd be really surprised if it were more than three minutes. They're basically ready to eat by then.

Fair enough. I haven't seen it myself so I can only speculate.

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

#610

Post by phonypc »

karolist wrote: post #500
rich_sasha wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory I hear from people who do it is that the animals die instantly in thermal shock. Would be great if someone in the know could comment; I'm certainly not endorsing this view!

I was around as a kid when my aunt boiled some crayfish alive. The way they run in the pot and the sound they make still haunts me to this day whenever I see these little animals. I don't need science to tell me if something feels pain or not when being boiled alive...

The sound is expanding gas escaping their shell. They don't have lungs or vocal cords.
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