Lobbying for Lobsters: Do they feel pain?
BY FARRAH LEONE
Invertebrates are in the spotlight as UK politicans are taking a new look at invertebrate rights, and the hot topic is boiling Lobsters alive. Animal rights groups are fighting to have these crusty critters included in the Sentient Being Law. Sentience is defined as “the capacity to have feelings” or “depth of awareness”.
New Zealand, Switzerland, and parts of Italy have already made boiling lobsters illegal, initiated a program for Lobsters to not be held in salt water, and prohibits transportation on ice to decrease unnecessary suffering. Although, many make the argument that boiling shellfish alive prevents viro bacteria from cultivating within the decaying tissue. Vibriosis comes with flu-like symptoms such as: fever, chills, headache, cramps, and excretion out of both ends. However, one solution presented would be requiring restaurants to purchase a shock machine, to kill the animal immediately before being cooked.
At first, I thought this was obvious, “Of course Lobsters feel pain. They have a nervous system!”
All you really need to know is that the ganglia are oval shaped nerve cell bodies. The COC are two nerves that wrap around the esophagus. Lobsters also lack the part of the mammalian brain which allows us to process pain. Bottom line is, there are nerves throughout part of its body.
But just because they have a nervous system and they have inherited/learned reflexes to noxious stimuli (things that could potentially be dangerous to the animal), that does not create a case for pain in every scientist’s eye. Upon further research I have seen that some have criteria that pain must have an emotional response. A reflex is what animals do without thinking. The pain comes along after the initial threat is over and the animal still feels the impact of being harmed.
Because there seems to be mixed definitions of pain, I have taken the criteria and definitions from Recognition and Alleviation of Pain and Distress in Laboratory Animals. The act of boiling these animals is a relatively quick process and therefore made categories like recumbency and depression difficult to answer.
Guarding: attempting to protect, move away, or bite
Weirdly enough, the idea of guarding was tested by getting lobsters high. Lobsters were placed in a tank with an e-cigarette pumping in THC. It was confirmed through tests after the fact that THC had entered their body despite them breathing through gills instead of air. THC may have calmed the lobsters down before their demise, but their reflexes were equally as strong as those that were not treated. This therefore, provided strong evidence of sentience as opposed to noxious reflex.
Vocalization: crying out when palpated or forced to use affected area
I could not find a single scientific paper I could access to prove that they do or not. But the logic tracks. Lobsters cannot vocalize because they do not have vocal cords. The “scream” people hear when boiling Lobsters is air escaping from their shells. If that is the case, this category needs to be fully eliminated from determining if they feel pain.
Mutilation: licking, biting, scratching, shaking, or rubbing
I saw somewhere that Lobsters do not give a large reaction when a claw or leg is taken off. But I would also like to argue that from what I saw, there are no nerves there. Most people do not scream at the hair salon because there are no nerve endings in our hair. I wanted to see a case where the areas that have nerves are put to the test.
Scientists have been studying all different types of crustaceans to come to an answer on crustacean sentience. A study done in 2007 on prawns seemed to suggest crustaceans might feel pain. Researchers placed an “irritant – acetic acid – onto one of 144 prawns’ two antennae, the creatures reacted by grooming and rubbing the affected antenna for up to 5 minutes”.
Restlessness: pacing, lying down and getting up, or shifting weight
The Caridoid Escape Reaction is a reflex seen in different crustaceans. When Lobsters are placed in boiling water, their tails will flip which in the wild would cause them to jump backwards but still face forward.
Sweating: if they sweat
I did not find anything that says Lobsters sweat. But if they do, please email me because I am very curious.
Recumbency: unusual length of time (the state of leaning, resting, or reclining)
Personally, I do not think any creature that knows it is in immediate danger will be resting. I think this category will also have to be voided specifically for boiling lobsters.
Depression: reluctance to move or difficulty in rising
I feel the same way about this category as I do for the recumbency category. There is not enough time to tell specifically for the act of boiling lobsters.
Abnormal Appearance: head down, tucked abdomen, hunched, facial distortion, or pallor
While researching this category, I automatically jumped to the Caridoid Escape Reaction, but we covered that as a reflex. I would argue that the farther removed an organism is from a human species, the more difficult it is to recognize individuals and differences in behaviors.
Based strictly off of the information above, I am mostly convinced that Lobsters do not experience pain in the way humans experience pain. I think our real problem here is that we are anthropomorphizing pain. One side of the argument is that by assigning pain to the animals, we are doing them a disservice. But my argument here is that we are being speciesist (yes it's a term coined by Richard D. Ryder to explain exploiting animals and used by philosopher Peter Singer in Animal Liberation ) by assuming that the only acceptable way of interpreting pain is the way that humans or vertebrates do it. Just because we do not understand it, does not mean it doesn’t exist. Just because I may not fully understand how corn is broken down and chemically changed to create gas, does not mean that it doesn’t happen. There is a select group of people who understand that, just like there is a select group of organisms that are created to interpret their own versions of stimuli. Many researchers on the pro-pain side claim that although Lobsters do not have the same visual cortexes as humans we cannot deny that they do see.
I have left this investigation with more questions than answers. What do you think? Leave a comment below!