Do Lobsters Feel Pain?

[paulraphael]

On the contrary, it seems to me that people are suggesting - with some scientific backup - that one method of killing a lobster is little different from another in terms of pain and/or suffering inflicted. That is very different from arguing against being humane, because it denies that method A is more humane than method B. I haven't seen any very convincing scientific argument to refute that yet.

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If you review the scientific literature I think you'll find a lot of scientific speculation, but very little evidence supporting strong conclusions, on either side. So we're in the realm of educated guesses.

Personally, when I see reactions that look just like pain reactions from other creatures, I'm inclined to think they could be evidence of pain.

[Jon Savage]

I think this is a result of the fact that few people ever participate in killing what they eat.

Crustaceans/Mollusks are often purchased alive; mammals (far) less so.

Did I worry that the clams in my Vongole pasta were not happily popping open in the pan?

Nope. Mr. Pacific lobster in my pot may not die all to happy either but I'm aware of his demise and respect the food just as I did so with Mr. (live) bunny I slaughtered and bbqd.

At the end of the day we kill what we eat directly or indirectly. I say own up to it, acknowledge it and drive on.

[Mallet]

I think this is a result of the fact that few people ever participate in killing what they eat.

Crustaceans/Mollusks are often purchased alive; mammals (far) less so.

Did I worry that the clams in my Vongole pasta were not happily popping open in the pan?

Nope. Mr. Pacific lobster in my pot may not die all to happy either but I'm aware of his demise and respect the food just as I did so with Mr. (live) bunny I slaughtered and bbqd.

At the end of the day we kill what we eat directly or indirectly. I say own up to it, acknowledge it and drive on.

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Still, though, I find it hard to equate the death of an oyster to the death of a fish or even a lobster (having personally killed all of the above:from clam to mammal). I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that these organisms have different capacities to experience pain/negative stimuli, and that our care in minimizing this discomfort should be commensurate. After all, one wouldn't throw a rabbit in a pot of boiling water, right?

I agree with Milagai that the goal should be to minimize cruelty. However, cruelty itself is a slippery concept (is it minimize any negative reaction, or to minimize unnecessary pain: how do we decide what is necessary?). In any case, it seems clear that methods which dispatch a lobster the fastest way possible are likely to be the less cruel (with the possible exception of freezing), and that since these methods (like the knife technique) can be implemented at no cost to us, it would seem irrational not to do so. The question of whether lobsters "feel" pain is an interesting one to be sure, but I'm not sure the end result is any different to an ethical eater (given that you are willing to eat this animal, dispatch it in the most humane way practicable, or not at all).

Feeling philosophical,

Martin

[Jon Savage]

I think that death sucks. Killing stuff sucks too. Agreed that one should minimize the suffering however that is best accomplished. I won't be losing sleep over any lobsters though karma be damned.

[Adam Balic]

If an organism doesn't have consciousness and therefore cannot have a subjective experience, how can it suffer?  Simply reacting to stimuli -- even stimuli that we, as conscious organisms, would perceive as intensely negative -- does not equate to consciousness, "suffering" and "pain."  Even organisms as rudimentary as simple bacteria react to stimuli.  If a flagellate reacts to a high temperature that would be painful to a human being, and is even high enough to eventually kill the flagellate -- does that mean that this single-celled organism is suffering and experiencing pain?

I understand the point you're making, but are you saying that lobsters don't have consciousness? Surely they're a step above bacteria?

And anyway, I'm sure most people eating live lobsters etc. don't have a degree in malacostracan crustacean neurophysiology. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that they really don't care whether lobsters feel pain. It's really just this attitude that's a little shocking to some of us, I guess.

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Human nature. People get worked up about having to dispatch a lobster or crab, but many of the same people think nothing of buying a fillet of fish were there is some evidence of pain and avoidance behavior, or for that matter a slice of cow.

That's OK, empathy is not a bad thing, even if it is not strictly rational.

[paulraphael]

People get worked up about having to dispatch a lobster or crab, but many of the same people think nothing of buying a fillet of fish were there is some evidence of pain and avoidance behavior, or for that matter a slice of cow.

That's a mischaracterization of what's being discussed. Those who are concerned aren't demonstrating that they're somehow blind to the suffering of creatures sold dead at the supermarket.

The issue is that in this case, we are doing the slaughtering ourselves, so we are in a position to make choices about how to do it.

The questions being asked are reasonable. The current lack of solid, scientific answers to the questions doesn't change this. On the other hand, many of the dismissals of the questions strike me as smug, baseless, and strangely defensive.

[Adam Balic]

I don't agree. Kill it yourself or not, as a consumer your are ultimately responsible. Not quite sure what I see as smug in this or my previous commments.

But to follow, not sure that demonstrable squeamishness should be given the weight of respect that you are suggesting. Fish have been demonstrated to avoid painful stimulations, no such strong evidence for a lobster. Personally I eat both fish and lobster, but I would respect a position of somebody that said "I don't eat fish due to the the potential suffering" over "I don't eat lobster because it is cruel". Weight of evidence and all that.

[Mallet]

Also, there's a careful distinction to be made between killing and cruelty. Killing is not automatically cruel and, as paulraphael pointed out, what we've been discussing is the question of whether lobsters feel pain, not whether it's ok to kill them. The answer to that question (whether they feel pain) will determine how much care we should put into killing them (two extremes: (1) carrots: it would be patently ridiculous to talk about various carrot harvesting techniques in terms of minimizing carrot pain (2) cows: we generally deeply care about minimizing pain during the slaughter process, and design slaughter techniques appropriately, the questions: where do lobsters lie on that spectrum?).

As a few of us have stated above: in the absence of conclusive evidence either way, the most ethical thing to do is to try and choose a method of dispatch which is likely to minimize pain (especially if that method carries no cost to the dispatcher).

[Mallet]

If an organism doesn't have consciousness and therefore cannot have a subjective experience, how can it suffer?  Simply reacting to stimuli -- even stimuli that we, as conscious organisms, would perceive as intensely negative -- does not equate to consciousness, "suffering" and "pain."  Even organisms as rudimentary as simple bacteria react to stimuli.  If a flagellate reacts to a high temperature that would be painful to a human being, and is even high enough to eventually kill the flagellate -- does that mean that this single-celled organism is suffering and experiencing pain?

This is an important point, but I think overly simplified as stated. Surely an organism's capacity for consciousness will affect its capacity to suffer, but consciousness is not an all or nothing thing (and consequently is not exclusively a human capacity). Obviously, a lobster will not experience pain in the same way that a human one (apologies if I'm just belaboring this point), but that doesn't mean it doesn't experience a response which is analogous (homologous?) to our experience of pain.

As I've said above, determining an organism's capacity to experience pain and suffering should to a large extent determine our level of consideration in dispatching it, or whether current dispatching practices make it ethical to consume it at all. This is why the current discussion is not *just* a philosophical one.

[slkinsey]

Martin, there is a third question: Assuming that lobsters experience something like what we would identify as "pain" (I would argue that they can't, for which see * below), on what basis can we assert that killing them one way causes more or less pain than any other way?

* Here are some tidbits from the wikipedia article on pain: "Pain . . . is the unpleasant sensory and emotional experience an individual has when they perceive actual or potential tissue damage to their body. Pain is highly subjective to the individual experiencing it . . . Pain is defined as a subjective conscious experience."

Without sentience and consciousness, I would argue that there is no such thing as "pain." This is why, for example, when someone is horribly burned and would be experiencing excruciating pain, we put them into a medically-induced coma. No consciousness = no pain. I would further argue that an organism that does not even have a brain cannot be called sentient and possessing of consciousness, and therefore cannot have a subjective experience -- all of which are necessary to have "pain." Things like "consciousness" and "sentience" and "ability to experience emotion" are associable with a certain level of neurological complexity. Shrimp don't "think."

This is not to say that lobsters don't have enough processing power to generate a message that says something like "Negative sensation! Move away!" under certain circumstances. But I wouldn't put that under the same name as the subjective experience we call "pain." It goes without saying that lobsters do not have a cerebral cortex.

Meanwhile, as others have observed, you can see a lobster in the wild have one of his legs or claws torn off -- something I think we all agree would be "painful" to us -- and there is no negative response or avoidance behavior. But there is some question in my mind as to whether avoidance behavior, which is all the lobster evidence we have, is a great indicator of sentience, consciousness and pain. For example, scallops have eyes and will swim away from a predator. And yet, we slice their shells open with a knife, sever their main muscle at both ends and eviscerate them -- all while they are still alive. And it takes a lot more scallops to make a meal than it does lobsters. Does this mean we shouldn't eat scallops any more?

All of which is to say that I think we ALL agree that, operating on the assumption that lobsters can experience pain, we would like to treat them in a way that minimizes that experience to the greatest extent possible. No one is disagreeing with that. The question as to whether they can experience pain is more or less a side discussion. What IS important is whether, given the assumption that lobsters can experience pain, we have any basis whatsoever for choosing the least painful method of killing them. I haven't seen anyone offer a reasoned and informed position that convincingly argues against submerging in boiling water compared to any other method. "It seems like it should be that way" just isn't good enough -- it certainly isn't good enough to point the finger at someone else who is choosing a different method from you. Myself, I think that it's unlikely that any way is particularly painful to the lobster, and in consideration of the fact that it's impossible to definitively choose one method over the other on the basis of inflicted pain, I choose whatever method best suits what I am doing with the lobster.

Edited April 10, 2008 by slkinsey (log)

[Mallet]

Well, the thread is called "Do lobsters feel pain?", so I hardly feel this is a side-discussion

I've argued above that consciousness is not an all or nothing thing and I do not take it as given than a lobster does not display some degree, no matter how small, of consciousness. If we take a look at the wikipedia articles on consciousness and sentience, we find things like:

Consciousness is a state that defies definition, but which may involve thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, dreams, and an awareness of self, although not necessarily all of these. [...]

The issue of what consciousness is, and to what extent and in what sense it exists, is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. [...]

In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to the environment, in contrast to being asleep or in a coma

Although we both agree that some sort of subjective experience is likely to be necessary to experience pain, I think we disagree on whether an animal like a lobster "experiences" (in the sense of a subjective experience) anything. Since we don't even know why humans experience anything, I think it's premature to exclude a rough analogue for lobsters. Certainly all the elements of consciousness are found in various degrees throughout the animal kingdom, so it might not be that crazy to suppose that consciousness itself is also experienced to varying degrees. Obviously shrimp don't "think", but I find it difficult to believe that an organism can experience relatively complex social behavior (including mating behavior, social/territorial behavior, formulating foraging strategies), without incorporating some sort of model of "self" in its perception of the world.

As for your other question

On what basis can we assert that killing them one way causes more or less pain than any other way?

I think that a simple but potentially useful rule of thumb is that the method which terminates sensory activity in the fastest way with the least stimulation is likely to cause the least pain (I don't know what the tradeoff should be, surely it varies with each species). I don't know enough to really say which method does this for lobsters, but since lobsters have a fairly diffuse nervous system which some high-level functions spread throughout, I think a whole-body dispatching method (like boiling or electrocution) is the most promising.

From this page

The general consensus is that death is most rapid - - and, if they do indeed "feel" something, it is only momentary - - if they are placed into a boiling pot of water.

I also found this summary interesting (2005)

The largest of decapod crustaceans are complex in behaviour and appear to have some degree of awareness. They have a pain system and considerable learning ability. As a consequence of this evidence, it is concluded that cyclostomes, all Cephalopoda and decapod crustaceans fall into the same category of animals as those that are at present protected.

edited to add: I should note that the report cited above does not suggest boiling as an acceptable method but instead recommends chilling and electrical methods, and makes no mention of the knife to the head method. I can't tell if they suggest it's ok to chill and then boil, or that you should chill until death.

Edited April 11, 2008 by Mallet (log)

[slkinsey]

Although we both agree that some sort of subjective experience is likely to be necessary to experience pain, I think we disagree on whether an animal like a lobster "experiences" (in the sense of a subjective experience) anything. Since we don't even know why humans experience anything, I think it's premature to exclude a rough analogue for lobsters. Certainly all the elements of consciousness are found in various degrees throughout the animal kingdom, so it might not be that crazy to suppose that consciousness itself is also experienced to varying degrees. Obviously shrimp don't "think", but I find it difficult to believe that an organism can experience relatively complex social behavior (including mating behavior, social/territorial behavior,  formulating foraging strategies), without incorporating some sort of model of "self" in its perception of the world.

I think that these behaviors can be performed by organisms that to not possess sentience and the ability to have a meaningfully subjective experience. Indeed, I think that behaviors similar to these can be performed by fairly rudimentary machines -- like the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner that leaves its base station, "forages" around my apartment for cat hair, and returns to its base station "mate" every afternoon. As I said before, higher functions such as self-awareness, the ability to think and experience emotions, etc. are associable with a certain level of neurological complexity.

In Marsden CD. The emotion of pain and its chemistry. Ciba Found Symp. 1979;(69):305-13, the author writes: "Pain is not an electrical impulse derived from tissue injury but an emotional experience arising when a nervous input is interpreted in the light of experience and emotional context as being 'painful' ". This says to me that, whatever it might be that a lobster experiences when it experiences tissue damage, it is not "pain."

As for your other question:

On what basis can we assert that killing them one way causes more or less pain than any other way?

I think that a simple but potentially useful rule of thumb is that the method which terminates sensory activity in the fastest way with the least stimulation is likely to cause the least pain (I don't know what the tradeoff should be, surely it varies with each species). I don't know enough to really say which method does this for lobsters, but since lobsters have a fairly diffuse nervous system which some high-level functions spread throughout, I think a whole-body dispatching method (like boiling or electrocution) is the most promising.

I think so too... and yet a lot of foodies seem to think this is the worst possible way.

I also found this summary interesting (2005)

The largest of decapod crustaceans are complex in behaviour and appear to have some degree of awareness. They have a pain system and considerable learning ability. As a consequence of this evidence, it is concluded that cyclostomes, all Cephalopoda and decapod crustaceans fall into the same category of animals as those that are at present protected.

The EFSA is a quasi-political organization that has a strong bias to be extra-careful about these things. This is proper and as it should be. We should, I think, try to be as humane as reasonably possible.

That said, I should point out that:

(1) The report on which the EFSA's recommendations are based is for laboratory animals, not food animals. The bar for lab animals is an incredibly high bar (for example, they aren't willing to say whether or not ants deserve special protection).

(2) The EFSA's recommended methods for killing decapod crustaceans is hardly practical in the real world. They say you can chill in air or an ice/water slurry, but on what basis are we to know whether and when the lobster has expired? They can you can immerse the lobster in clove oil. Um... no, thanks. Or you can electrocute. So, we have chilling, where the home cook has no way of knowing when or whether the lobster is actually dead, or we have two other methods that are impossible at home.

(3) It may give some indication of the level of care expected by the EFSA to think about their recommended methods for killing fish. Listed as "acceptable" are MS-222, benzocaine, etomidate and metomidate (killing them by anaesthesia). Electrical is acceptable "for some species." "Maceration" is okay for "fish less than 2 cm in length." One step further down the "okay list" is concussion, which is only to be performed by "experienced personnel" and death must be confirmed. Sodium pentobarbitone is also sort-of okay for larger fish, via intraperitoneal injection. And so on. Nowhere is "dragging through the water by a hook penetrating the lip, then thumping on the head followed by gutting " mentioned as an acceptable way to kill fish. Keep in mind that this is a generally accepted way to kill fish, and fish have brains. What fish don't have is more easily anthromorphized legs and hand/claws that lobsters have.

Edited April 11, 2008 by slkinsey (log)

[Daniel]

Do trees feel pain is a better question..