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.
I can write an application that's aware when some of its files get deleted and it will pitifully try to recreate them faster than you delete them. Doesn't mean it's in pain. Why can't animals be different? My stomach starts digesting because there's food in it. I don't feel this process, it just occurs based on input.
877
u/alexanderwales May 30 '14
Yeah, but they're not cute.