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 sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers"
Interestingly, and maybe I'm wrong, I don't think that the sale of live animals to random people is currently banned in the UK (i.e. I can buy a live sheep if I want to, as far as I know). It's the slaughter that is controlled. If so this proposal goes further.
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.
Please define "feel".
They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no.
The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.
> 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 gymnastics to convince yourself dropping a lobster in a boiling pot doesn’t cause it to “feel” pain when you could just not do that? Lentils are so damn good.
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 at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.
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 pigs by steaming. Could you imagine the suffering?
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.
This is a good question. I don't have an answer. I don't eat meat, never have, never killed anything in my life, other than mosquitoes. I assumed that boiling alive is a horrific way to die.
I’d be happy if we started at simply not killing lobsters and other animals for food (or for any other industrial purpose). You’re right that we could spend a lot of time debating the finer points of it but as you said: lobsters are easy. By that logic I would imagine so are chickens and cows and baby sheep (lamb) and pigs. So let’s start with the “easy” stuff. Whether or not we allow ourselves to harm insects or something while harvesting grains is another question. We could ponder whether it’s ethical to kill bacteria, but we’d die if we didn’t do that so let’s not fret about that.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing? If you really mean to say that deciding not to eat lobsters is easy then let’s go with that logic and stop eating all the bigger animals too. Seems an easy place to start.
>A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing?
I don't think this is the most generous take. I think what most people are trying to find is the underlying principles. Consider the following potential first principles:
1) Minimize suffering
2) Minimize animal death
3) Minimize charismatic mega fauna death
4) Minimize climate impacts
5) Maximize human health
6) Maximize human performance
7) Maximize human longevity (healthspan or lifespan)
Each of those can lead down different, sometimes competing tracts. Can vegan/vegetarianism be compatible with any of those? Sure. Can it optimize all of them at the same time? I'm doubtful. It's certainly possible that in the rush to do something we end up on the wrong trade-off. That's why it's import to drill down on exactly what one is claiming is ultimately important.
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.
>Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly
This applies to industrial meat production. Do your thoughts change in regards to hunting/fishing which doesn't (necessarily*) rely on industrial crop agriculture?
(I realize a lot of species population numbers - especially deer in the Midwest - are inflated due to the availability of crops for them to feed upon. But there are other species where this isn't necessarily the case.)
Yes, I'd say hunting and fishing don't have this problem. I have other ethical issues with eating animals, but hunting wildlife is orders of magnitude better than industrial agriculture.
That sort of claim is going to require some numbers for what you define as "nutrition density". Picking at random 100g of steak vs 100g of kidney beans you get more calories, equal protein, far more potassium, vitamin c, iron, vitamin b, calcium, and magnesium from the beans. I enjoy a good steak too, but I know it's a luxury.
> 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?
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.
People love to ask me this. One guy said deer are being run over by tractors so as a vegan I’m killing deer.
I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals).
I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we don’t have to use harmful chemicals to do farming.
But in my mind there is a clear distinction between accidentally harming insects while harvesting lentils and intentionally breeding animals in cages for slaughter.
If you think that line is arbitrary and you can’t understand it, I’m not sure I can help.
I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but some people adhere to a consequentialist worldview, where intent does not matter (or matters relatively little). It's the same outlook that creates the need for good Samaritan laws. I don't agree with it in whole form, but it should be recognized as a valid philosophical framework.
I understand that, but I have a hard time believing a vegan diet could possibly harm animals more than an omnivore diet. Like it just sound so absurd and I run in to a lot of people online that just seem to want to bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason. Like the guy that said I was killing deer by eating only plants because it means more tractors and tractors can run over deer… that seems to me to be a shoddy leap of logic, not a genuine point I should consider.
>bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason
I think this is also the most likely reason because humans try to rationalize cognitive dissonance. But in the nature of the HN guidelines to try and take the strongest possible interpretation of someone's comments, I'll try to reframe it.
Suppose someone has a foundational principle that all animal life is sacred. Also suppose that person is a consequentialist. Following the first point, the life of an insect is every bit as valuable as the life of an elk*. It's easily conceivable to me that farming, in the current form that most of use get our food, kills many more animal lives per calorie than eating the elk. If one is a consequentialist, it doesn't matter if there was the specific intent to kill those thousands of insects (and fawns, and fish from runoff etc.), it only matters that my choice led to their deaths. Compare that to the hunting of the elk, where it's conceivable that only one life was lost. From that perspective, a vegetarian/vegan diet could be considered more detrimental to animal life.
(I specifically chose elk to avoid the complication of how much farming goes into livestock feed, but hopefully you understood the point)
If you're like me and don't necessarily agree with the above framework, it still highlights that most of us have unarticulated assumptions that may not hold as we go about our daily choices. E.g., even if people claim that they think all animal life is sacred, their actions display an assumption of a hierarchy to that value.
I don't know if this is helpful, but this 2003 research estimates about 6 animal deaths per acre of agricultural harvest, or about 7.3 million animals.[1] That puts it about on par with industrial animal consumption. But granted it seems much more difficult to have accurate estimates.
I think part of the problem is that most people in industrialized economies are extremely far removed from the food supply. I don't think it's super common, but also not unheard of for deer (especially fawns) to be killed by harvesting machinery as they bed down in fields. Considering hunting a deer may yield 60-70 lbs of meat, it might be possible to claim that reduces total animal deaths. Now I don't know how you'd arrive at a final number because most people are omnivores and still eat plants, but I don't know if I'd immediately dismiss their claim as absurd.
I see from your profile that you work in the farming machinery business so I'd be curious if there are any specific mitigations you would consider to alleviate this problem?
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.
"Feeling pain" has never been a particularly intellectual experience to me. Pain isn't some sort of abstract thought, it's a raw sensation that the harmed flesh itself seems to feel. When I step on a lego I feel it and flinch away from it before I even realize it. I guess that sort of reflex is what you're calling "experience structural damage" but I say it feels like pain.
Except we can suppress those nerves higher up and you'll never actually feel the pain. And you can trigger similar flinching reflexes with a focused tap to the right spot, which is clearly painless in every way.
It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs.
Listen, I'm no vegan, I eat meat and I don't condemn others who do the same. But "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
> It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs.
Look, I'm just saying that a flinch isn't proof of pain. I'm not saying they don't feel pain, but if you want to prove it then you need better evidence than a flinch.
> "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
My policy is to go for a quick maximally-humane kill if you're not sure. But that doesn't mean every single animal definitely feels pain.
So again, it's complicated. For example, naked mole rats famously don't feel many kinds of pain, and those are mammals!
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 blood.
This isn't a moral argument for me, it's simply giving a fair comparison as to what the likely choices are for these animals. The choices are not pain from humans or some pain-free experience in nature.
I will say that being boiled alive is likely one of the worst ways to go though - luckily there are nearly painless alternatives to killing lobster that many people employ.
“…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.
I would suggest for most all animals being raised with constant supply of food and having your health maintained by intelligent actors is far better a life than the brutality found in nature. Caveats apply I'm sure, but in general a farm animal is raised intentionally to eat as much as it can with as little stress as possible. I'd be curious what criteria you could give that would rank animals in nature as suffering less than animals specifically raised in captivity with a specific goal of reducing stressors.
> Human’s system for producing meat has an insane amount of harmful externalities. The polar bear fits into an ecosystem that generally find balance.
harmful to what? to the world ecosystem? You mean the ecosystem that we generally believe has had 5 mass extinction events prior to humans ranging from 75 to 95% of species being wiped out in each of those events? Is that what you call "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.
Well this isn't a strawman at all. I'm not building up some weak argument as you suggest. It's a documented and understood that most animals have predators and of prey species, predation is the most common way to die. Have you ever seen an animal kill another animal gracefully? It does exist, but it is not common.
also, yes I can bypass the moral question and I will do so gladly - completely subjective arguments are pointless, I feel very comfortable in accepting a different moral code than you and I'm fine with your moral code being different than mine.
“Caveats apply I'm sure…” “harmful to what?” You’re living with blinders on. Willfully or not, idk. We can’t have a conversation if you don’t at a minimum gather some basic, widely and easily available information. Enjoy your life of ignorant bliss.
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.
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 died to become your food (plant of animal); in this context the question on my mind would be whether you can honestly pay your respects to something you boiled alive because it would have tasted worse cooked another way.
It feels disrespectful to the food.
Slaughter is natural, we should find a way to be ok with how we do it.
* I like to offer egotistical arguments for altruism, just my perspective
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.
Your premise may hold true in the general sense but not in the specific. I don't think lobsters produce adrenaline. There may be some other hormone that has a comparable effect though
"Experience" is the tough part to define here. Granted, it's not an easy answer but there are some smart thinkers who've tried. Here's an interesting take from the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran
"your withdrawal from a hot kettle is a different pain from the pain that you then contemplate. In the first case, the pain from withdrawal from a kettle, there is no qualia, no meta-representation."
From his framework, to truly "experience" pain, there needs to be a sense of self. You need higher levels of cognition for the "meta-representation" that causes suffering in our human conceptualization of the term. (There's some interesting brain lesion studies about people who lack this sense of self. They can witness their own body interacting with the environment but have no actual "experience" of the action; it's as if they are watching someone else perform it.) Everything more primitive to that higher cognitive function is just stimulus-response. For example, Gerald Engelman draws the line at lobsters in terms of what "experiences" pain and suffering. The implication being anything below that from a neural perspective would be cruelty-free to consume.
Different sets of neurons fire for different people on the same stimulus. Does that mean you don't feel pain in the same way another person feels pain?
That's an open question. But if we would assume that answer is "no", then all alive beings can "experience pain" because it' the same mechanism in all of them. Jellyfish can "feel the pain" if we will assume such answer, and I imagine a single boat travel cutting and tearing thousands of jellyfish will easily beat this whole lobster conundrum in the severity of the problem :)
PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.
does one need to feel pain in the same way for it to be classified as pain. pain is pain. one of the things that unites us as humans is our ability to feel it and empathize with another.
if an animal can feel pain it doesn't matter if it is the same pain. Also I recall that Nirvana once sang "It's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings". For generations people thought that is true.
Some in my family call themselves Pescaterean because they for some reason don't want to inflict pain on animals (that look like us).
my point is pain is pain - the rest is just mental gymnastics that allow us to justify our own behavior.
That's the problem - I don't know a strict and correct definition for it, not even close one. At minimum there are two polar possibilities - 1) any neuron firing due to damage is a "feeling of pain", or 2) only conscious brain can "feel pain". But there can be other definitions, multiple ones.
First option is possible but not productive for the discussion because then almost everything can feel pain, including some single cell organisms I think.
Second option is anthropocentric and at least at a glance looks incorrect.
The thing is the word "feel" itself is anthropocentric, basically we make analogue with our understanding of pain and project it on other living organisms.
