Do you believe that shellfish feel pain?

[QuestionableMouse]

Just been talking to my mum on the phone and we got to talking about stuff from childhood including our seaside trips. She used to buy two or three live crabs and boil them when we got home.

I was always horrified by it as a child and thought it was horrible. I'm still uncomfortable with the idea as an adult.

It seems that it's recommended to kill crabs/lobsters now before cooking.

Has been recent studies that indicate it is inhumane as they do feel pain and also quite intelligent

Great post chocolatelyasfuck sad to read though.

There is no humane way to kill something that doesn't want to die. If an animal wants to live and would take measures within its power to stay alive then it's in humane to take its life - be it quick or slow

Oh and any vegetarians here that don't eat shellfish because they can't bear the thought of a crab being boiled alive, and move snails out of the way so not to step on them... why aren't you vegan? Have you seen the baby chicks being ground alive if they don't serve the egg industry? And have you seen calf's being taken from their distressed mothers so that the milk can be sold.

*ChocolatelyAsFuck

Sorry copy paste error.

That should read: “ All vertebrates have nervous systems complex enough to feel pain. But there is an increasing body of evidence that invertebrates also feel pain, and that some of them have their own sophisticated nervous systems.”*

Yes, your example of the octopus has a complex nervous system and appears to be not only conscious, but quite bright!

Yes, your example of the octopus has a complex nervous system and appears to be not only conscious, but quite bright!

I don't think you can't really compare a crab with an octopuse.
A crab is a big bug thing very low in the food chain with most likey very simple cognition.
An octopus is a very intelligent, complex predator in a completly different species group to crabs. Comparing them because they are both invertibrates is like comparing dogs and fish.

Octopus and crabs have much less in common than dogs and fish have.

And don’t forget how beastly octopi are to crabs.

Eat them alive they do!

Depends which ones, there's proof that some shellfish don't have nerve endings like we do.

I still don't eat any of them.

@rosiejaune very true.

It wasn't so long ago that some people believed newborn babies didn't feel pain

*LynetteScavo

It wasn't so long ago that some people believed newborn babies didn't feel pain*

It’s hard to understand that point of view.

Descartes saying dogs don’t feel pain says little for his powers of observation, too.

Nothing more sustainable than walking in the sea, filling a bucket full of clams, and taking them home for a lunch of spaghetti vongole.

The best answer might be to hypnotise them first.

@LynetteScavo in America/Muslim/Jewish communities they still believe that it would seem.

There is no such thing as human slaughter of any animal. All animals want to live their one and only precious life. It is an indisputable form of brutality to take that from them to service our own pleasure.

There is no such thing as human slaughter of any animal. All animals want to live their one and only precious life. It is an indisputable form of brutality to take that from them to service our own pleasure.

But that's part of the way this world works, everything feeding of one another. Is a seal brutal for eating the crab while it's still alive and wriggling?

Animals higher up the food chain eat animals lower down the food chain.

I don't actually eat meat because I don't like the way it's farmed. But I don't actually think it's barbaric to kill and eat somthing, that's just life. I just think we should do it in the kindest way possible, give it a nice life and kill quickly. Modern farming doesn't do that so I don't eat meat. But catching a wild crab, stabbing it in the brain stem and eating it actually seems OK, better than what we do to live stock.

From what I understand, lobsters do respond to pain physically and hormonally. If they lose a claw, they tend to the stump by rubbing it. They also release cortisol, the same as humans.
It takes 2-3 minutes to die when plunged into boiling water and apparently they writhe about the whole time. It was actually made illegal in Switzerland a couple of years ago!

Is a seal brutal for eating the crab while it's still alive and wriggling?

I don’t know - is a seal keeping crabs in cramped conditions, gassing their babies to death at a day old, and funnelling them just the thousand into slaughterhouses?

Animals in the wild kill what they need out of necessity to survive. It’s so far from our current farming methods that I don’t see how any reasonable comparison can be made between them.

I don’t know about seals keeping crabs in cramped conditions, but a whale eats 40 million crustaceans a day.

I hope it stuns them humanely first.

It depends on how you define/perceive humane. Its definitely possible to have a form of slaughter that is more humane than another.
All human interactions with the animal kingdom are arguably detrimental to those animals. We just all draw our boundaries at different points.
Simply by existing, the human race causes suffering to animals. Keeping a pet could be considered inhumane.
I want to eat animals and their by-products, I therefore look for ones produced in conditions I am happy with.

And arguably kind & compassionate & ethical animal rearing is much more beneficial to that animal than having to battle to survive in the wild. And by reading animals for food we could in theory limit our impact on wildlife.

It looks like Burger and Lobster used to stun their lobsters before cooking rather than boiling but it looks like they high pressure steam them now.

They kill the lobster (as humanely as possible) with a stunning machine called a Crustastun. Thus avoiding having to boil the poor crustacean alive or the mess in slicing it down the middle of his head with a cleaver.. londoneater.com/2011/12/23/burger-lobster-cocktails/

I am irked by food critics only crying alligator tears about their suffering though:

Every time I slice a lobster in half, and the claws and legs let go of life as the knife goes in his head, believe me, a little bit of me dies inside).

Having seen my own dinner close up, in a way I have not for many years, didn't make me want to throw away my leather shoes and become a level-2 Vegan – it simply made me appreciate what I was about to eat, more, perhaps, than I usually would after half a bottle of wine and a gin and tonic. The sense of reconnection didn't just mean some airy-fairy moral balm – it also meant my grilled lobster tasted twice as good and for that I am truly thankful.

It is wrong to cause unnecessary harm to any living creature, be it a fly, a carrot, a crab or a Christmas tree.

I think our moral attitude is very anthropomorphic, not only to crabs and other shellfish but also plants.

Plants sense environmental change and noxious stimuli, responding by growth but obviously not relying on nerves for brains. However, just because they lack nerves and brains, and so we do not identify with their experience, does not mean it is any ethnically better.

Plant ethics have been around since Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, with the chapter “The Views Of An Erewhonian Philosopher Concerning The Rights Of Vegetables”, but plant rights are woefully neglected.

Plants are complicated, adaptive life forms that are autonomous and perceptive, and the more one studies plant neurobiology and physiology, the more one respects, for example, the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee extolling the dignity of plants.

I always stab the cabbage through the heart.