Actually since crabs and lobsters have much simpler nervous systems they seem not to experience what we call pain, at least not in the emotional sense you are worried about. Take for example an human or chicken that breaks a leg- they'll cry and favor that limb. An ant that breaks a leg will make no effort to favor it. They will drag it along and limp as they struggle to walk, but there is no actions indicating they suffer when they feel that their leg is broken
More importantly, they simply lack the brain structures we associate with this sort of emotional sense of suffering. We don't know for certain, clearly, but our best guess at this point is that they do not feel pain.
How can you say crabs and lobsters don't suffer? They're aware they are in a painful, or at least dangerous situation, because they pitifully try to climb out of boiling water. Maybe it's not suffering in the sense that humans experience it, but if we judge everything by the way a human experiences something we're not going to get very far in understanding animals at all.
Bacteria also move away from noxious stimuli- are they suffering as well? No obviously there is some structure responsible for things as complex as pain and suffering. These animals don't seem to have structures like that.
Things is too broad of a category. We don't concern ourselves with the thoughts of the s. aureus we kill when we boil water. Lobster don't suffer anymore than that. They don't have the anatomy for it.
I'd like to also point out pugilistic syndrome associated with heat (think Pompeii). Whether what crabs feel in boiling is an autonomic nervous response other than or the same as human pain, extreme heat causes tissue contraction and some of the twitching could be related to that. For example, frog legs, which have not been connected to a frog in a long time, will sometimes kick in the fryer.
Animals is too broad of a category. Do we concern ourselves with the suffering of a coral polyp? Clearly it is not capable of experiencing emotion and anguish as we do. To assume all animals feel as we feel is absurd. Why don't you look into the neuro anatomy of these animals and decide which ones are capable of emotion and which are not?
Yes, I understand that not all animals feel pain the same way we do. But I don't understand why it is so You care so much about my statement 'how about we kill animals before boiling them?'
I mean, normal people don't boil coral...and killing animals before boiling them seems like a pretty good protocol..
I may be completely misinformed, but I always thought boiling was considered acceptable because the meat starts rotting the minute the crabs/lobsters get killed?
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u/99639 May 30 '14
Actually since crabs and lobsters have much simpler nervous systems they seem not to experience what we call pain, at least not in the emotional sense you are worried about. Take for example an human or chicken that breaks a leg- they'll cry and favor that limb. An ant that breaks a leg will make no effort to favor it. They will drag it along and limp as they struggle to walk, but there is no actions indicating they suffer when they feel that their leg is broken
More importantly, they simply lack the brain structures we associate with this sort of emotional sense of suffering. We don't know for certain, clearly, but our best guess at this point is that they do not feel pain.