Crabs and Lobsters May Get Similar Rights To Mammals In UK Experiments (theguardian.com) 72
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Scientific experiments on crabs and lobsters could be curbed when the animal sentience bill becomes law, the Guardian has learned. There are few restrictions on how crustaceans and decapods can be treated in scientific studies, in contrast with mice and other mammals, for which there are strict welfare laws. Because scientists do not have to register how many crustaceans and decapods they experiment on, there are no numbers for how many are used. But because they breed quickly and are sensitive to pollutants, they are frequently used in experiments, especially those that look into how different types of pollution affect the body. But this could be about to change, Home Office sources said after crabs and lobsters were recognized as sentient beings which could feel pain.
The new legislation, which is awaiting royal consent after being approved by parliament this month, means ministers must consider the sentience of animals when implementing policy. This could result in restrictions on how crabs and lobsters can be treated when experimented on. They are not included in the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, unlike mice, octopuses and various other animals. This means that no licenses or training are required before they can be used in procedures that can cause pain, suffering or distress.
Robert Ellwood, professor emeritus at the school of biological science at Queen's University Belfast, authored the research that found crabs and lobsters feel pain. He welcomed the potential legislative development, but said it must be applied to the commercial fishing industry as well as scientists. "This is a step forward and if people are happy to accept that decapods are sentient and experience pain, then they should be given some protection. But I would see this ... as a problem if they still leave millions of animals in commercial practices that are treated the same as before," said Ellwood, who has worked with crustaceans for 30 years. He added: "To ask scientists to go through all sorts of regulations that affect their work but allow these animals to be boiled alive at will would be unfair. "It is asking for more rules, regulations and red tape, it will take longer to conduct an experiment, but that is a good thing, if it is applied across the board."
The new legislation, which is awaiting royal consent after being approved by parliament this month, means ministers must consider the sentience of animals when implementing policy. This could result in restrictions on how crabs and lobsters can be treated when experimented on. They are not included in the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, unlike mice, octopuses and various other animals. This means that no licenses or training are required before they can be used in procedures that can cause pain, suffering or distress.
Robert Ellwood, professor emeritus at the school of biological science at Queen's University Belfast, authored the research that found crabs and lobsters feel pain. He welcomed the potential legislative development, but said it must be applied to the commercial fishing industry as well as scientists. "This is a step forward and if people are happy to accept that decapods are sentient and experience pain, then they should be given some protection. But I would see this ... as a problem if they still leave millions of animals in commercial practices that are treated the same as before," said Ellwood, who has worked with crustaceans for 30 years. He added: "To ask scientists to go through all sorts of regulations that affect their work but allow these animals to be boiled alive at will would be unfair. "It is asking for more rules, regulations and red tape, it will take longer to conduct an experiment, but that is a good thing, if it is applied across the board."
What about cooking practices? (Score:5, Insightful)
To ask scientists to go through all sorts of regulations that affect their work but allow these animals to be boiled alive at will would be unfair.
This was the first thing that came to mind for me as well. It doesn't make sense to me that we would create all these extra burdens on certain industries (research in this case) while allowing food companies and home cooks to boil them alive.
Re:What about cooking practices? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Expecting any kind of rational consistency in legislation makes even less sense. If the legislation is narrow enough, some other species will be selected for the experiments or if that's not possible they'll just be conducted in other countries where there are fewer legal barriers.
You can't control what happens in other countries, but we can control our owns. Just because some localities allow child marriage, it doesn't mean we should not pass laws prohibiting the practice.
Don't confuse incremental approaches with failure, and don't confuse rationality with defeatist nihilism.
Re:What about cooking practices? (Score:4, Interesting)
I pith lobsters before cooking by inserting an ice pick in the area of the brain and wiggling it around. It's very quick and easy. This is the same method required by US lab animal standards when fish need to be killed. There doesn't seem to be enough nervous system in a lobster to support anything like consciousness, but I do this out an abundance of caution. I eat animals, but I don't want them to suffer.
I'm a catch and release fisherman, but in rare cases where I take a fish (e.g., hatchery trout, which are trash that take food out of native fish's mounts), I pith and bleed them. This is primarily for humane reasons, but it also improves the quality of the fish for eating. In Japanese fish markets they have a pithing procedure called "Ike Jime" in which a fine wire is run up along the length of the fish's spine to its brain, instantly killing the fish.
I have no idea whatsoever of how to pith a crab.
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Ever read the testimonies of lobotomies? You know, where they used knitting pins to separate out lobes of the brain?
Oh yeah, they're supposed to be in shock and rendered instantly unconscious. Ever interviewed a creature that has been pithed?
This is just like the organ donors who are streaming tears as they are being cut apart on the operating table. Yeah,
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Pithing is much more destructive than a lobotomy. Within less than a second, the animal has no brain to experience suffering with. Even if the animal were capable of being interviewed before, it would surely would not be after.
I understand your visceral revulsion to pithing. It is unquestionably a consciously brutal act. But if you can't perform that act, you're not sparing the animal, you're sparing yourself. You're either paying someone else to do it, in the case of meat you buy, or you're simply igno
Re:What about cooking practices? (Score:5, Interesting)
I pith lobsters before cooking by inserting an ice pick in the area of the brain and wiggling it around. It's very quick and easy.
Lobsters are invertebrates. They don't have an actual brain. Their nervous systems are actually more comparable to the typical insect. See this to get an idea of what that implies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Basically that wasp can't actually tell that its head is mostly detached from its body. Its "brain" is more or less spread all throughout its body. The motions its making with its legs is because it thinks its face is dirty because it feels the ground below where its head actually is. Lobsters function basically the same way. The few invertebrates that do have actual brains tend to have many nerve clusters identifiable as brains, and losing one or even several of them won't kill them. Actually its interesting what octopus tentacles are capable of when they're severed:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com... [smithsonianmag.com]
When you pith the lobster, you're likely just reducing its mobility, but it's extremely unlikely that it actually kills it or even reduces its ability to "feel pain". It's unlikely that they have any idea of the concept of pain. Kind of odd though that the people who oppose boiling lobsters are typically of the variety that suggest we get our protein from crushing insects between our teeth.
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Well, if you want to be technical, I destroy the lobster's cerebral ganglion. I too doubt lobsters have enough of a nervous system to experience subjective suffering, although they do have nocioceptors to react to noxious environmental stimuli -- yes I have actually looked into this. If we assume that animals *must* use the same neurological structures that we do in order to have consciousness, then it's not possible for lobsters to suffer. But we can't definitively rule out emergence of something like con
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Well, if you want to be technical, I destroy the lobster's cerebral ganglion.
Lobsters don't have a cerebrum. The particular ganglion you're referring to has all of 30 neurons.
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Anatomically that 30 cell nerve ganglion overlays a neuropil with about a million interconnections. The entire structure manages sensory input from the eyes, antenna and other sensory organs, which would be a lot to ask of just 30 neurons. Overall the lobster has around 100,000 neurons, which is pretty small. For now there is no scientific consensus on whether such a nervous system is capable of producing subjective experience, although it seems unlikely. When there is definitive opinion published in a sui
Pain response (Score:2)
"It's unlikely that they have any idea of the concept of pain."
Now, I'll freely admit I only briefly read the summary. But I do recall tests done with either lobsters or crabs where approaching a region in the test environment caused a "shock". The subjects reversed course, and then practiced avoidance of the area.
Call it what you want, but if the sensation made them not want to have it reoccur, it seems like it would be pretty far down the analogous-to-pain path.
Having said that, since I read that researc
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But I do recall tests done with either lobsters or crabs where approaching a region in the test environment caused a "shock". The subjects reversed course, and then practiced avoidance of the area.
Call it what you want, but if the sensation made them not want to have it reoccur, it seems like it would be pretty far down the analogous-to-pain path.
Plants and bacteria have reflexive responses to aversive stimuli. Body's that are physiologically functional, but brainless can respond to aversive stimuli.
You can program robotic cockroaches to respond to various stimuli in a similar manner to cockroaches (scuttle from light, protective response to 'injury', etc.).
This is separate from 'experiencing' pain.
Lobsters and crabs are 'meat robots' - like insects, they simply have too few neurons for subjective experience and their responses are simply preprogra
Re:Pain response (Score:4, Interesting)
"Plants and bacteria have reflexive responses to aversive stimuli. "
I would argue that is not the same thing. The creatures avoided going near a specific place. That requires an anticipation of consequences for moving through that zone, which is fundamentally not the same thing as reacting to stimuli.
If I chose not to frequent a particular street at night, I'm not reacting to the sensation of being stabbed.
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What they probably experience is more analogous to anxiety than pain, though the severity of it is anybody's guess.
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What they probably experience is more analogous to anxiety than pain, though the severity of it is anybody's guess.
They have physiological distress that results in an aversion response. They are on the level of a simple state machine (30 neurons for processing and responding the rest of the neural circuits are relaying sensory information in and motor commands out).
Those 30 neurons are being used for motion planning; shelter assessment; threat assessment; sexual assessment; and food assessment.
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Again we can't definitively rule out the capacity for suffering emerging through convergent evolution. If an animal has the same neurological structures that produce consciousness in humans, I think we have to presume they are capable of suffering in absence of proof to the contrary. If an animal lacks those structures, we cannot be sure what it is capable of. Octopuses have brains that are radically different than mammalian brains, but are clearly quite advanced.
Now I think it's extremely unlikely a ner
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In your case, it reduces risk of suffering from zero to zero. It's unchanged.
The thing you may be reducing however is stress. That is a universal response to stimuli in cell based organisms, including those without nervous systems. The problem there is that stress is not pain nor suffering, because stress in humans is considered bad... because it can induce suffering. Just stress with no suffering tends to lead to good outcomes rather than bad, as it's a system of directing a biological life form to adapt t
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Oh dear. Wiggling the pick around isn't as fast as headfirst into boiling water, though many actually steam lobster, and so give it a deadly sauna that also is not immediate. But at least you're trying. Meaningless to me. You and I cannot know death is instantaneous, or you wouldn't wiggle it around.
But hatchery trout are 'trash' fish? Taking food from the mouths of native trout? I've never, ever known hatchery trout be be anything but native offspring, in fact most programs rely on capturing and literally
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That is by FAR the most reasonable sentence I have read on this topic in a looong time.
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Well when it comes to meat, I just remember a few basic rules:
1. Animals are delicious.
2. If animals weren't meant for eating, they wouldn't be made out of food.
3. I too am made out of food, but eating me would be cannibalism.
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"3. I too am made out of food, but eating me would be cannibalism."
Not to a wolf. It's about winning, competitive existence, and so far humans have outperformed other species. We won't give them a level playing ground, BTW, that's not how you win.
Re: What about cooking practices? (Score:2)
Nah.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=r7... [youtube.com]
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What's someone supposed to think when a law's own name is a lie?
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Despite your confident assertion, actual research generally disagrees with you.
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First thing that came to my mind was that "animal sentience" doesn't exist
I'm guessing you never owned a pet* or hung around a farm.
(*) Or if you did, it was something weird and cold blooded...
Re:What about cooking practices? (Score:5, Informative)
I believe you are confusing sentience with sapience.
Sentience is the ability to feel and perceive things. Most animals have this, although there are different levels. The sentience of crustaceans was never in doubt, but the level of sentience is.
Sapience is the ability to think and acquire wisdom. This is what most people really mean when they say sentience; they just misuse the term. Hopefully we don't literally get into the situation of words changing meaning because of constant misuse.
Sapience -> (latin) sapientia -> wisdom / intelligence
Sentience -> (latin) sentientem -> sensing / feeling
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That's an awfully terrible argument considering humans die from heat stroke. Or co2 poisoning, as another example of a cause of death not associated with pain. If the environmental effect causes the death occurs slowly, the flight response is not activated. Nerves are not a computer. That doesn't mean humans are incapable of experiencing pain when the stimuli is different.
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Actually CO2 poisoning does cause a flight response, very similar to that of drowning actually. Nitrogen doesn't, however, which is one of the reasons it's considered to be a humane death. A high body temperature will trigger a flight response, but if it was preceded by being physically exhausted to the point that you can barely stand up, as is the case for most people that die of heat stroke, then it's just something you'll put up with until you fall unconscious, and the actual "heat stroke" (defined as yo
different perspectives (Score:2)
To ask scientists to go through all sorts of regulations that affect their work but allow these animals to be boiled alive at will would be unfair.
This was the first thing that came to mind for me as well. It doesn't make sense to me that we would create all these extra burdens on certain industries (research in this case) while allowing food companies and home cooks to boil them alive.
Look at it from a different angle: Creating these extra burdens on certain industries (based on scientific evidence that these creatures do feel pain) is a facts-based starting step towards bringing similar legislation to food companies (and eventually to home cooking.)
As we better understand the limits (or rather, the scope and spectrum) of animal cognition and pain, we can broader and improve our laws against animal cruelty.
You try to do that against the food industry when it comes to crustaceans, w
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Awareness is a great thing, and research to build that awareness is good too. But actually creating legislation targeting just one industry is different than simply engaging in research to build awareness.
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Awareness is a great thing, and research to build that awareness is good too. But actually creating legislation targeting just one industry is different than simply engaging in research to build awareness.
Well, yeah. Building awareness and creating legislation *ARE* different things. I fail to see the big revelation here. Moreover, being *different* doesn't mean it is wrong, or the wrong approach.
This is how things work: Legislation is created around topics that some % of the constituency or interest groups *are aware of*. In a democracy, one would expect that legislation is created around a topic for which enough people are aware about. The legislation might still be wrong or insufficient, but that cannot
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perfect is the enemy of good
They don't want to know what I did to Sebastian. (Score:3)
Link to the science! (Score:5, Informative)
Anyways, I've long been curious about this. With about ~100k neurons, there doesn't seem to be a lot going on upstairs in a crustacean, but feeling pain might be part of what does. I've boiled a lot of crawfish, and to me they didn't seem to mind, but others imagine they suffer horribly. I'm not sure I'd trust a mammalian limbic system to accurately intuit a crawfish's experience either way. And, this study finds "results are consistent with the idea of pain in these animals" but is ultimately inconclusive.
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That isn't pain though, even plants respond to irritants. Having nerves doesn't change anything, the experience of pain and emotions with it are done in a thing called the neocortex in most animals. Lobsters and crabs don't have one, Octopuses interestingly do have neural structures that perform the same function as neocortex, but that's the only invertebrate that does.
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ICYM (Score:2)
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The pet keepers are fine. Hey, free cool pet. There are people that buy them and release them, and thats potentially a *very stupid* move, if the crustacean is not native, since they.
American lobsters are already behaving invasively in europe. Its not an unfounded fear, we're seeing pet fish turned into ecosystem invaders around the world, simply because more often than not the invading species doesnt have a specialized predator to control its numbers. Which mean the local species which DO have specialized
That should make them as happy as a clam (Score:3)
Say, now that we're talking about clams ...
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I have never seen any evidence that clams are happy. Mushrooms covered in shit is another thing.
You have the right... (Score:3)
to be delicious!
"A good thing, if it is applied across the board." (Score:3)
"...it will take longer to conduct an experiment, but that is a good thing, if it is applied across the board."
Yeah...the cutting board.
Obligatory (Score:2)
April Fool's was 25 days ago. (Score:1)
They just let us think we're in charge (Score:2)
The crabs have been secretly ruling us all along!
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A bit late (Score:2)
The Tories sold the waster-water treatment facilities to private companies who paid out £57 billion in dividends, while at the same time pumping raw, untreated sewage into river, lakes and oceans about 1200 time PER DAY.
That's why they can't export shellfish to the EU.
going off the rails (Score:1)
Overgrown insects of the sea don't even have a neocortex, no consciousness. They're a mobile pile of cells without self-awareness or feelings.
My Grandmother Cooked Crabs (Score:2)
There on the York River in Virginia, back in the 50's.
I watched her once as she dumped a basket of blue crabs into a big pot boiling on the stove ... and watched those poor suffering bastards as they tried to climb out!
I haven't eaten a crab since. I don't eat lobster either.
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If you freeze Lobsters prior to boiling it puts them into natural hibernation. When you later drop them in the boiling water they literally die in their sleep before they can wake up. It's probably more humane then how we butchered mammals as they are slaughtered while conscious.
Of course knowing that still might not get you over the hump of something that clearly bothered you as a child.
International consensus? (Score:2)
Was the international consensus about the question if lobsters feel pain answered or do english politics only rely on national universities now?
I'm still going to cook them (Score:3)
Neurons (Score:2)
A lobster only has 100,000 neurons. That is low enough that it is a 'meat robot'. While it can respond to aversive stimuli - it certainly can't "feel". It doesn't have the neurological machinery for it.
This is far less sophisticated than the software we are using for image and sound processing in machine learning. It is also a trivial number compared to what is used in GPT-3 for writing generation.
I could see extending such protections to octopodes. But lobsters and crabs, this simply makes no sense.
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Who's to say we are doing image and sound processing efficiently.
Is there a theory of what computational capacity 100k Neurons have similar to, say to Shannons law for the data carrying capacity of a channel ?