Crabs and lobsters are basically bugs, whereas an octopus is a creative, playful, intelligent creature with amazing capabilities. It seems strange to group them together.
I assume that Dr Jonathan Birch, Associate Professor at LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, and his team of scientists didn’t encounter this insightful perspective when they reviewed “over 300 scientific studies” in order to arrive at their conclusions…
In seriousness though, this comment is a prime example of speciesism. Even if it were true that these crustaceans were “basically bugs” how does it follow that no regard should be given to their suffering? Does being a “bug” justify being boiled alive?
They are only being “grouped together” in that they are being granted the most basic consideration: that they have “the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm”.
The fact this is somehow just dawning on modern society is a sad indictment of our blinkered and callous disregard for other species. A child could tell you that other living creatures experience pain and distress through simple observation or even based upon, dare I say, the innate understanding we all have about our fellow animals.
It's weird how use of the word "speciesism" implies that some place humans above other animals as a result of some kind of fallacy or irrational thinking, and not because we are humans and therefore more valuable to each other. Never mind the fact that we have consciousness and ego and complex nervous systems, whereas lobsters do not.
> not because we are humans and therefore more valuable to each other
I value my children more than I value your children, but you will likely disagree with my assessment, even though it isn’t unexpected. And I would have to admit my assessment is not objective.
> Never mind the fact that we have consciousness and ego and complex nervous systems, whereas lobsters do not.
That’s how speciesism works: we try to find some kind of difference between us and other creatures, and then say, because they lack X they are not worthy of consideration. It’s okay if they suffer. This is precisely the same logic that was used to justify slavery, for example.
The other problem is that the line keeps moving, because we keep discovering how similar we are to other animals. There was a time when science claimed that animals did not have emotions, which any dog owner could tell you is nonsense.
The truth is that we do not really know exactly what a lobster experiences. Shouldn’t we therefore be cautious?
I honestly believe that at some point, the majority of humans will look at our system of factory farming and “harvesting” of wildlife in much the same way that today we view slavery, colonialism and other egregious examples of human disregard for other lives. I am not saying they are the same thing, but I do think that they are in the same category.
In your definition of speciesism, you are doing exactly what you accuse your-defined "speciesists" of. You are manufacturing ("try to find some") a definition of speciesism to paint other-people as the bad guy. Your comparison of their actions with slavery is just to demotivate any response.
In animal kingdom, animals kill each other ruthlessly. African dogs and other animals eat their prey from back-to-front while they are alive. Are all animals speciesists? Are all animals committing an act equivalent to slavery?
Humanity survived on hunting for tens of thousands of years. So the only reason we survived is because we were "speciesists"? If that's the case, then I am okay with being a speciesist.
We have to value our species over other species - if it ever came to choosing 1 human being or a million <insert animal>, we would always choose a human being (given that killing those animals won't destroy the ecosystem, thus harming human beings).
>Humanity survived on hunting for tens of thousands of years. So the only reason we survived is because we were "speciesists"? If that's the case, then I am okay with being a speciesist.
Humanity also probably only survived difficult conditions because many of our ancestors raped and killed each other over rare resources and lack of willing sexual partners. Hence by your logic we also should be okay with being killers and rapists, because they're the only reasons we're alive.
Or you know, we could use our brains and recognize that our ancestors lived in completely different environments than we do and we also have a much better understanding of the world than they did. Hence it would be incredibly stupid to use their actions, world view and ethics as a foundation for our belief system.
Good point. But I would argue that we refrain from killing each others because it's no longer in our best interest to do so. We can afford to feed everyone and give everyone a decent life without killing each other. Also saving people gives us a bigger pool of talented people and diverse genetics.
When we cannot give each other a decent life, we resort to mass killing (even today) - think of all the wars started due to hunger or ethnic reasons.
My point was that we are responsible for the safety and prosperity of each other, not any animal. We have no obligation towards the safety of some animal. Evolution tells us that we have to care about the survival of our species. And in certain cases, we will help animals but primarily where helping them helps us (for example, to maintain stable ecosystem).
As for dogs and cats, we use them for our benefit - we feed them, protect them, give them a good life for our own benefit - because they have evolved to make them seem cute and domesticating them makes us happy and gives us mental comfort. This makes them happy at the same time (but that's a side-effect, not the intended effect in most cases)
> We can afford to feed everyone and give everyone a decent life without killing each other. Also saving people gives us a bigger pool of talented people and diverse genetics.
We can also afford to feed everyone without harming so many animals. In fact, reducing our reliance on animal products is likely the only and much more efficient way to feed everyone. And not only that, we're also destroying whole ecosystems because of our unnecessarily large demand on animal products, which in consequence causes huge problems for future generations.
So harming animals less is definitely in our interest.
> When we cannot give each other a decent life, we resort to mass killing (even today) - think of all the wars started due to hunger or ethnic reasons.
I'm also thinking of all the wars yet to come, because of the consequences of climate change or uninhabitable areas, which both were (among other things) caused by our ridiculously high meat consumption in a few wealthy countries.
> My point was that we are responsible for the safety and prosperity of each other, not any animal.
The fact that people even have to fight for children to not get abused for us having some luxuries (rare minerals for the latest smartwatch or phone, coffee beans, chocolate,...), should make it clear that we don't feel responsible for each other on a grand scale. There's a varying degree of responsibility and it quickly vanishes with greater physical distance to each other and the less we feel connected in one way or another.
And it's not uncommon to feel more responsible for animals than for humans. Like my neighbor's cat is treated better than those children working in some mines or farms, also because it's more beneficial to some of us to treat those children badly.
Or to put it differently, responsibility for other human beings which are outside of our closer groups is nothing that comes naturally or just is or is even necessary for our survival. It's something we had to come up with on our own with our ethics. So we have to fight for it and constantly remind ourselves about it or otherwise we keep doing all the horrors we still do to each other (e.g. slavery). It's no different than our ethical beliefs in other regards, e.g. animal suffering.
> In animal kingdom, animals kill each other ruthlessly
Not that long ago, humans routinely tortured, killed, raped other humans sometimes even just for fun (and in some places of the world very much still do).
Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question.
These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other property you deem worthy in a living being, thus making them inferior to another species.
> Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question.
I strongly disagree. We have more food than ever before. More clean water than ever before. More safety and prosperity than ever before. More innovation than ever before.
As for our ecosystem, humanity has solved any and every calamity ever before. And we will solve this one as well.
Don't get me wrong - we should not take climate change lightly just because of the belief that we will solve it. We should take it seriously and tackle it head-on, but with the belief in our ability in problem solving and innovation. We cannot solve a problem if we believe that humanity is going to destroy itself.
>These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other property you deem worthy in a living being, thus making them inferior to another species.
I don't understand this sentence. Can you clarify?
> I don't understand this sentence. Can you clarify?
You’d be pretty dumb to saw off the branch you’re sitting on. Yet that’s what we’re doing. On the surface, we seem to be lacking any kind of self preservation instincts or « hive mind » to preserve our species. If, say, a bee was looking at humans trying to determine if we’re intelligent or not and they applied bee intelligence metrics, we’d miserably fail because every bee knows that the survival of the hive is what dictates their action and behavior, duh.
And yet we consider bees to be bug “automatons” but consider ourselves the most advanced life form around. But seen from a distance, without using human values as a framework for evaluating intelligence, we might be some of the dumbest species around.
according to animal metrics for intelligence, sure we are stupid. But we have strong evidence why our metrics are more effective than animal metrics :
1) human death rate is lowest among almost all species
2) human comfort + happiness rate is highest among all species
3) our accomplishments and understanding of the world is a million times that of any other species
4) all other species survive because we allow them to. We can (and have) eradicated entire species.
etc. etc.
We don't need a hive mind, we have intelligence. Bees act the way they do because they are genetically programmed to act that way, and they don't have the ability to think or reason for themselves. We do. We protect our species when we need to. Not out of genetics (maybe a little bec of evolution), but out of intelligence.
>because they lack X they are not worthy of consideration. It’s okay if they suffer. This is precisely the same logic that was used to justify slavery, for example.
Wowzers, this is the most strawmanny characterisation of this view I think I've seen outside of scifi villains in B movies. I don't think the most charitable view is that species "deserve to suffer." It's that they have different capacities for suffering, and that differences in the complexity of the nociceptive and the nervous systems are inputs into our understanding when we try to figure this stuff out. That leads to, say, jellyfish being treated with different moral urgency than mammals, or eggs being treated differently than hatched birds.
The B-Movie scifi villian characterization also is problematic not just because of it's anti-intellectual shallowness, but also because it considers moral assessment in it's negative sense but not it's positive. Namely, that this is about tending to the needs and moral well-being in cases where the urgency in protecting it is greatest, and we can make good choices to do the most good. We make choices that prioritize the well-being and safety of our children in ways that take their well-being seriously, and we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building. To treat them equally, or to prioritize the other way around, would find someone facing the moral condemnation of the community as well as legal consequences, and nobody would be convinced to withhold those judgments by speeches about speciesism.
> ... we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building
The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.
You can live a full, healthy life while minimizing to as full extent as possible the suffering you directly or indirectly inflict on other sentient creatures.
The argument you present here against your characterization of the OPs point is akin to saying "my kid really loves McNuggets so I don't care about the horror 50 billion chickens suffer in a given year".
Again, the building isn't on fire; you don't have to choose one or the other.
>The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.
Well we're off to a bad start, because this is just literally incorrect. I remember way back in elementary school we had a fire chief come in and talk about fire safety, about having a plan, etc. Inevitably the question about saving pets comes up, and we heard them talk about how fire safety means prioritizing safety of humans. I just did a quick google about fire safety and pets and if you want to play the Google Stuff game, there are numerous sites with guidance on fire safety that reaffirm this.
Secondly, for goodness sake, it's a hypothetical intended to highlight an underlying principle. Because sure, of course you want to save everybody in all cases. But insisting that you don't even want to consider the premise of a hypothetical is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the hypothetical that is focused on precisely the situations where you don't have that luxury of avoiding all possible harms.
Despite your protestations to the contrary, our lives are entangled with the lives of animals in ways that present tradeoffs. Here on HN there was recently an article about the beneficial impact of wolves on ecosystems, in part because they hunt deer, and make driving safer for humans. Figuring out how to protect Atlantic Salmon in rivers depends upon "cover species" such as eels and other fish, so that predators don't just focus on salmon. Indigenous tribes support protections for Atlantic salmon in part because they personally benefit from having salmon available as a natural resource they can fish for.
Only in the context of an internet comment section would somebody seriously try to insist that we aren't interrelated in these ways, that we don't have to think about these choices, and expect it to be treated like a respectable position.
You don't minimise suffering by not eating meat. You're maximising your bragging
rights about your superior ethics. What minimises the suffering of farm animals
is... farming. Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd
suffer from disease, parasites and bad weather and they'd be eaten by predators. Each and
every one of them. And most of the time, they'd die while being eaten alive.
At least humans kill our food before we eat it. That is minimising suffering.
Farm animals dont' live miserable lives. Animals in large scale, factory farms are mistreated, but they are still better off than in the wild. The majority of farms in the world are small-sale family farms were animals are treated at least as good as humans:
> Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares, operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35 percent of the world's food, according to a study published in World Development.
If you listen to vegan propaganda you may get the impression that all farming everywhere in the entire world means that animals must be tortured in factory farms, but that's a lie. There is nothing in small-scale farming to make animals' lives miserable.
"If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a hilarious misrepresentation of the cause and effect of how farmed animals come to be, and I assume you know that and are being disingenuous.
"Vegan propaganda" ok Cheese Goddess. These animals not existing is preferable to the hell they endure on factory farms.
> "If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a hilarious
misrepresentation of the cause and effect of how farmed animals come to be, and
I assume you know that and are being disingenuous.
"If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a dirty lie that you
said yourself and I never did. You put it in scare quotes to say that they're my
words, but they're yours and you're the one who's outright lying. So much about
"disingenuous" then.
And I don't support or defend factory farming, quite the contrary. I think it's
a disaster and I'm very upset that it's taking over the world like a cancer
spreading and displacing small-scale farming. And I'm very well aware of its
horrors. It's you, and people who bundle all of farming with factory farming
like you, who are clueless about farming.
Partly this is because the majority of people like you are natives of the
countries that are at the heart of the cancer of factory farming, like the
Americas or North and Western Europe, countries that consume, per capita, about
double the amount of meat as anybody else. People who grew up thinking that
"food" means "meat", who have probably never even seen a farm animal up close,
who have no clue about how their food is made, or what's in it, even when
they're not eating meat. And it's people like you, with strong opinions but weak
knowledge, the people of nations who have destroyed their own food production
and replaced it with an industry that feeds them shit, that want to tell the
rest of the world, all of us other people, how to eat? That's just tragic and so
stupid, and arrogant and conceited.
Btw, my username is because I make cheese and your comment makes you sound like
a puerile idiot.
It’s one thing to prioritize saving children from a burning building but not mice, and another to justify one’s decision to do so based on the neural complexity of children compared to mice. I don’t think killing a mouse is the moral equivalent of killing a child, but that’s me making a value judgment. I don’t need to cite a scientific (objective) criterion for this, such as how many neurons a child has, or whether or not it is conscious or has an ego (if such a thing is even scientific).
Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here (although I don’t feel you’re arguing in bad faith, for the record - I can see how my comments may be taken that way). I don’t believe species ought to be treated equally but rather that we ought to give all species consideration.
It’s curious that this view is considered so extreme by so many, while the treatment we inflict on living beings, which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than the way we treat the billions of mammals currently trapped in the dystopian hell of factory farming.
>It’s one thing to prioritize saving children from a burning building but not mice, and another to justify one’s decision to do so based on the neural complexity of children compared to mice. I don’t think killing a mouse is the moral equivalent of killing a child, but that’s me making a value judgment. I don’t need to cite a scientific (objective) criterion for this, such as how many neurons a child has, or whether or not it is conscious or has an ego (if such a thing is even scientific).
I mean, you certainly can go ahead and declare that that is how it works. Declaring that Its Not About Neurons is most definitely a statement you can make. That's step 1. Steps 2, 3, 4 etc are making arguments in support of that statement, explaining what the alternative basis for making moral judgments is based on, explaining why it's a better system, explaining how its meaningfully different and not just a restatement of what I said but with different words, etc.
You haven't done any of those things though. So this boils down to saying "no! it's not that! It's something else!" If we were using Graham's Argument Hierarchy[0], this would amount to DH3, which is Contradiction. It's one step better than DH2 (responding to tone), but it's one step worse than DH4 which is making a counterargument, which involves stating something else (contradiction) plus a layer of reasoning and/or evidence of some kind. In fact I would say this is barely even a contradiction, because contradiction means stating an alternative and I'm not even sure what the alternative is that you're stating.
>Suggesting that I’m saying species ought to be treated “equally” is the real straw man argument here
That was basically being put forward as a definition of speciesm that I was responding to, so I'm not sure how that's a straw man. If you can elaborate on what it means to value species differently but not have it count as speciesm, but not to it based on appealing to any biological information about species, but with something that is still a "moral judgment" differentiating species, I'm all ears. Let me remind you that you were using "deserve to suffer" as your idea of good faith characterization of the view you disagreed with, which is B-movie scifi villian, which to me qualifies it as a straw man.
>which is often extreme to the point where “torture” is an accurate description, is generally ignored.
>As an aside, we treat jellyfish far better than...
These are also beside the point. So the long and short of it is there's not really anything responsive here that I can respond to.
Morality doesn't necessarily require deep intellectualism, I think. Much of the urgency in the vignettes of moral assessment isn't realistic, either.
To say it simply, there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do. There is much about our practices that absolutely reflects an absence of consideration - shouldn't we be working to improve that?
Saying that there is an inverse prioritization is not the matter at hand. We're not even on equal ground. It's just raising the bar for a thankfully growing number of different animals off the floor.
I maybe didn't grok your point of view on speciesism, though - could you try to reframe it?
>Morality doesn't necessarily require deep intellectualism
I don't think that a statement about avoiding pitfalls of anti-intellectualism needs to be read as endorsing the opposite extreme, and I don't making that kind of assumption contributes to constructive conversation.
>To say it simply, there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do.
This response to the burning building example is fascinating and strange to me for a number of reasons. For one I started by providing a simple, clear cut, face value example of a case where doing good means considering how to prioritize wellbeing of different species. And as far as the example itself is concerned, you're just not engaging with it at all, and asking about a different example.
I mean, fair enough, we can get to your chosen example, but I already feel like we're a bit off kilter. If that were not already strange enough, you are saying "there is no proverbial burning building that requires us to farm animals in the way that we currently do." Well, maybe not in your chosen example, but in some other cases there is, quite literally as in the example I just mentioned. And to be clear, it's not just that I want my example to be seen because I think I'm special. It's that if someone says there is no such thing as that proverbial burning burning (e.g. no reason to treat species differently), and I show an example showing exactly that, it would seem important to engage with that example, not just to switch to consideration of other examples.
So I don't know what the disconnect is here. As to your example, well, sure. I think you are right, there is no proverbial burning building requiring harmful farming practices, and in my opinion those should be abolished, as you can argue there is no calculus in which they are neccessary Perfectly true, both in the literal sense, and as a matter of principle that it's a case where you don't have to think of it in terms of tradeoffs. But here again, I am wondering where this is coming from? Do you think "save humans from fire before mice" means ignore harmful farming practices? Where are you getting that?
>Saying that there is an inverse prioritization is not the matter at hand.
Again, very strange to me. I feel like my comments are anchored to reality by the fact that I try to stick closely to responding directly to specific things that someone else said. In this case, the commenter I was replying to was speaking generally about speciesm. I felt this was narrow, and that a more fair characterization about what drives this way of thinking is that it's how to make positive, morally good choices, in contrast to their one-sided view that only talked about it in the negative sense, in terms of inflicting harm.
For some reason, you have come in and decided that me responding directly to that is "not the matter at hand." But again, it very much was, because the subject was speciesm writ large, and I was speaking to that. So I just don't know what you are talking about, at least not without a bit more framing.
> as far as the example itself is concerned, you're just not engaging with it at all
That's because I feel that it's a deliberate mischaracterization of reality and is being used to insulate a false equivalence against criticism.
I'm wondering a bit of the same that you are - when the topic of harmful farming practices is the primary focus, why did we deflect to "well, what about if a building was on fire?" Where are you getting that?
Indulge me - if we substitute the ideology of speciesism here with racism, do you engage with that topic in the same way - by saying "let's not focus so much on the negative reality of racism, but how to help racists make morally good choices"? I think it's fair to lump the abstraction of each together.
My statement about things being "not the matter at hand" were aimed at your conflation of giving animals a higher moral value than humans; that still stands.
>That's because I feel that it's a deliberate mischaracterization of reality
As I already said before and explained at length, it's a hypothetical example intended to illustrate a principle pertinent to the question of speciesm, in direct response to a comment that was about speciesm. I am not sure what "reality" you feel is being mischaracterized by directly speaking to an issue raised by the commenter. I honestly can't make heads or tails of what you are trying to say is being mischaracterized here.
>when the topic of harmful farming practices is the primary focus, why did we deflect to "well, what about if a building was on fire?" Where are you getting that?
There was no "deflection" from one topic to another. "The topic" was not one thing, but a couple of different things that are intertwined: farming that segued into a monolog on speciesm, and I was responding to the latter piece, although my response has implications for both. In direct response to that, I have put forward a hypothetical that illustrates a case that runs contrary to the idea of speciesm as being about creatures "deserving suffering". All I can say is that I am sorry that something that speaks directly to that question confuses you.
I'll repeat my question to you: how did you read "save humans from fire before mice" and take that to mean something along the lines of "therefore, disregard harms of farming practices?"
>your conflation of giving animals a higher moral value than humans; that still stands.
This is pretty incoherent to me. I would love to at least be able to understand and express a disagreement here, but I don't know what conflation you think has occurred.
So yeah, you haven't engaged with the point I've raised despite it being perfectly relevant, and you've expressed surprise, feeling that my point is off topic, which I feel is spurious. And you're saying a few things are being "mischaracterized" or "conflated" and I'm not sure what specifically you are talking about.
Again, I don't think your point was perfectly relevant. I believe that's why multiple people were picking on that particular nit.
I'm sorry I can't better help you understand which things I feel were mischaracterizations or conflated; it seems we're bound to be stuck at some lower levels of disagreement.
At least we can agree on not understanding each other! And, I suppose, that factory farms are a problem. Cheers!
And again, I'm sorry but I find that to be spurious, for reason's I've explained at length. You seem to feel there's too much conceptual distance between the hypothetical about speciesm and a comment about speciesm it was replying to.
So far as I can tell, what you are really objecting to is not my comment but to the idea of communicating through hypothetical examples.
That's why we try to deal with killings in a most humane way possible (basically a bullet to the head for larger animals, and cutting the neck for smaller ones).... not always, not everywhere, but we try, and we point the fingers at those who don't.
"I honestly believe that at some point, the majority of humans will look at our system of factory farming and “harvesting” of wildlife in much the same way that today we view slavery, colonialism and other egregious examples of human disregard for other lives. I am not saying they are the same thing, but I do think that they are in the same category.'
Do you believe that in our current world state we have some magical alternative we could use to feed the near 8 billion human beings that currently inhabit this planet?
We apparently won’t be able to feed 10 billion in the near future. Because using 40% of the worlds landmass to grow plants to feed animals to feed humans is as inefficient as it gets.
If we skipped the animals and ate the crops directly it would be far more efficient in every dimension (calories/area, protein/area, environmental impact)
You're not talking about animals in general though. You're talking about cows. Because every other animal we eat, eats something we can't eat. Sheep and goats eat hay, pigs and chicken eat garbage basically and fish eat ... ocean garbage.
And while it's trut that we can't feed 10 billion people on cows, that's also true for the fewer billions we have today: the most commonly consumed kinds of meat are chicken and pork, not beef. Beef is the most commonly consumed kind of meat in affluent western countries that are also home to the most vocal vegan and animal rights movements, which goes a long way to explain why many of the discussions about what we eat say "meat" when they mean "beef".
This is not at all the same logic that was used to justify slavery, unless you're trying to claim that actually lobsters are people? But it seems like you are just grandstanding and not trying to address the actual point here.
> The fact this is somehow just dawning on modern society is a sad indictment of our blinkered and callous disregard for other species
Well, lobsters eat fish and fish, as any child could explain to you, can experience distress and probably also pain. As far as animals go, both humans and lobsters are quite actually quite nice - there are species out there that poison their prey and eat it alive [0]. So this is not really a "disregard for other species", no more than it's disregard of a fox to eat a deer. Now, of course, by now we could be better than this, I fully agree with you here - but the fact that other species experience pain and distress when ending up as food was basically an universal truth until some very recent human inventions.
[0] I know some humans do that, too, but that's far from the general case.
At this point, I find it remarkable that people use the term “found studies” as anything but self selection. You can prove anything including that the earth is flat and that video footage in the moon landing is fake.
Don’t forget that the ancient alien theory is a phd research with published papers
Ah yes, the theory that since bad papers exist all papers are bad. Reading one study is not the same as reading (and then citing) many studies. Common sense is frequently wrong, for a lot of well-studied reasons.
There's also a large difference between one lone study which finds a thing using dubious methods and a cohort of studies which independently replicate the same results.
There is no shortcut for actually reading and understanding studies if you want to learn what a study does and doesn't show, but discounting science because some history is paper are bad is... tenuous.
Part of the challenge is that must people lack the education to differentiate between a good study and a bad one, so we just throw our hands up in the air and cede to confirmation bias.
I'm picking on your language choices rather than the overall point of your argument, but have you ever boiled a live crustacean before (and by this, I specifically mean fully submerging the animal under water that is under a rolling boil on a high-temperature flame)?
They don't writhe in agony and try to escape; they die pretty much instantaneously (I'm talking no movement in less than 2 seconds) and have no idea what's coming.
Again, this isn't a comment on the sentience or lack thereof of crustaceans, but boiling them alive isn't nearly as cruel as people make it out to be. What we do to pigs, chickens or cows is far worse.
What's done to pigs, chickens, and cows is a terribly low bar to clear. I suppose lighting an ant on fire with a magnifying glass isn't cruel because it happens quickly.
Personally how quickly an innocent being capable of suffering and happiness is killed doesn't factor into whether I call it cruel. Morality might be subjective, but the alternative requires accepting that needless, preventable death and suffering is ethical
The vegan argument is definitely a legitimate one, and not something I was trying to refute.
A lot of meat eaters have these strange ideas about what is and isn't cruel (the classic being "hunting is evil but eating farmed meat is totally OK"), ostensibly based on reducing unnecessary suffering but also completely devoid of hands-on understanding of what actually happens.
I will disagree with you on this point, though:
>innocent being
I've kept yabbies in a tank before as pets. They're absolutely metal creatures and will do things like rip the legs off of live rivals one by one, then slowly tear them apart over the course of hours. I saw one spear a fish wish its claw and pull its guts out too (as if unreeling a spool), just because it could. They're supposed to be herbivorous but damn can they be cold-hearted killers.
(Crabs are far more social, apparently, but I've not seen them interacting before).
As someone who grew up on a small beef farm in the UK but is also very picky about the source of the meat he eats, my personal anecdotal experience is that vegan or meat eater, the problem is that the vast majority of people have never been within 100m of livestock, and have zero comprehension of where their food actually comes from or how it arrives in their nice refrigerated trays.
The cows on my dad's farm probably had a better life than the dogs. There's a definite argument to made that they had a better life than me, and I was from a very happy and loving household. The same could not be said for the large scale conglomerate farm up the road. It's a distinction most people are simply incapable of making, because they just aren't exposed to it.
Quality of life isn't the whole story though. Longevity matters too. When I was a child if someone had asked me "Would you like to live a life of opulent luxury but be killed when you're 20?" I'd have said no.
There is no doubt that a good farm is better than a bad farm, but neither is particularly great if you're a cow.
I think it really depends what the alternative is. If it's that vs living in the wilderness in a small family and no other support against the elements or vicious predators, that's not such as easy decision. Cows don't have a support system, society, government, or social welfare in their non-farm state. They just try to survive the elements and the environment.
That seems like a false dichotomy considering farmers aren't going out and rescuing cows from the wilderness and giving them the roof and food they didn't have on their own. An alternative is to not breed them in the first place.
Yes, farmers do go out and rescue cows (and sheep, and goats, and pigs, and chickens) from the wilderness all the time.
More so, they protect those animals "from the wilderness" every single day. For example, in the farm I stay, we had some ten goats eaten by wild dogs in the last five years. The first time seven goats were attacked when they were alone in their enclosure. Now there's a guardian dog with them. The second time, a goat and her two kids were in another part of the farm, where the dog couldn't guard them and the wild dogs dug under the fence and killed them.
I say "killed", not "ate" because they didn't eat them. They savaged them and let them dying with their guts spilled all over the place.
Btw, what happens if we stop breeding farm animals? What's the plan at that point? Are we going to euthanise them all, release them into the wild to be eaten alive, keep them until they're all extinct? What does it mean to not breed them anymore, in practice?
> Yes, farmers do go out and rescue cows (and sheep, and goats, and pigs, and chickens) from the wilderness all the time.
Really? How many of the 70 billion land animals per year slaughtered for food were rescued from the wilderness, as opposed to bred in captivity?
> Btw, what happens if we stop breeding farm animals? What's the plan at that point [for the ones alive]?
The ones currently alive will be eaten by omnivores. Because we're not going to all switch over to veganism over night. Ideally there would be less demand as people stop buying animal products, so fewer are bred over time and livestock numbers dwindle. All the farm animals currently alive are goners, unfortunately. I'm suggesting stopping the cycle for the future ones.
Btw I hear this argument all the time and it's really silly if you think about it honestly. "If we stop we'd have to euthanize all the farm animals. Better keep doing what we're doing, which is kill them anyway plus countless more each year forever."
> Really? How many of the 70 billion land animals per year slaughtered for food
were rescued from the wilderness, as opposed to bred in captivity?
How should I know? There's no statistics about that kind of thing. And yet it
happens all the time: that's why farm animals have bells around the neck so
that when they wander off and fall into a ravine or get stuck on a tree (goats,
for you) the farmer can find them.
But aren't you moving the goalposts? First you said "farmers aren't going out
and rescuing cows from the wildernes". Now you're asking how many do.
I have to ask, other than the horror youtube videos of vegan propaganda, is
there anything else you know about farming?
> Btw I hear this argument all the time and it's really silly if you think about
it honestly.
So you mean to say I'm either silly, or dishonest? And that's not meant to shut
me up and end conversation with a "win"?
Well I won't beat about the bush as you do. I think what you propose is
demented. You're suggesting that, to avoid killing animals we should genocide
them instead. As if extinction is a better option than living a healthy and
happy life and dying at the end and in a better way than the animal would die
anyway, except it's now humans killing the animal, which seems to be the only
problem with the current status quo.
Hey, I know. Maybe we should genocide all the wild animals also, so that they
stop killing each other in horrible ways and dying half-eaten by something.
It's a rhetorical question, I don't actually care what the number is because it's diminishingly small. Farmers breed their animals, they're not filling the ranks of their livestock by going out and rescuing wild animals. I'm not talking about livestock that wander off the farm.
And you're not silly. I said the argument is silly. We all can make silly arguments from time to time when we don't really think a line of reasoning through or consider what the other person is saying. It wasn't my intention to attack your intelligence or integrity, sorry to have created this unpleasant interaction.
We obviously disagree on how rewarding the "gift of life" is. I know I wouldn't want to be a farm animal, and would prefer not to exist in the first place rather than live their life. With all due respect, I think it's you who doesn't have a clear mental model of farming at scale. You paint farming like it's your uncle's happy farm down the road. That's not how most people are getting their food. That doesn't scale to 70 billion land animals per year.
> Well I won't beat about the bush as you do. I think what you propose is demented. You're suggesting that, to avoid killing animals we should genocide them instead.
They are already being "genocided" though. That's what happens when they slow down their milk or egg production, or reach slaughter weight. I'm suggesting we stop breeding them just to be killed. This results in less killing.
Alright, thank you for your honesty and for making an effort to have a sensible
discussion.
Yes, farmers don't populate their herds with wild animals. I didn't understand
then what you meant by "rescue". Without using the word "rescue" though, it is
the case that humans did take in those animals and protected them and nurtured
and cared for them, when they first domesticated them. Entire subspecies of
animals are living in our care and with our support and don't have to survive on
their own in the wild.
You're wrong that I don't understand the evil of factory farming. It's actually
something that I have very strong opinions about: I believe it is an atrocity
that harms both animals and humans, both physically, mentally and ethically, and
that we will do well as modern societies to eliminate it. I don't believe it's
possible to raise healthy and happy animals at such mad scales. And I'm pretty
sure, though I've never worked in a factory farm (and I never would) that taking
part in that industry stains one's soul forever, at least for those people who
do have a conscience.
I guess I don't have to say that I believe small scale farming is a different
matter. That should be obvious that I think so.
But I also think you're wrong to say that small scale farming is not how most
people are getting their food. It absolutelyl is! I posted this link earlier, in
another thread, as a reply to another comment you made:
> Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares,
operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35
percent of the world's food, according to a study published in World
Development.
Most farming and agriculture in the world _is_ small-scale farming. And while
the food produced in such small scale farms is 35% of all food produced in the
world, that's partly because 2/3s of the world eat much less food than the other
third and it's also true that a third of all the food produced in the world is
thrown out:
And I probably don't have to give you any links to convince you that certain
people in the world eat way, way too much meat (as well as everything else!).
This is particularly true for the people in the Americas and Western Europeans
who eat about twice as much meat as the next people down the line. I believe
this is a matter of production, rather than demand, that the Americans
particlarly eat so much meat just because that's where most of the world's
factory farms are located, and I'm pretty sure we could feed all those
meat-lovers just fine without CAFOs if they could be convinced to at least halve
their meat consumption. I believe so for the reasons I gave above: that most of
the world already does fine without factory farms, most of the world eats a
small fraction of the meat eaten in the Americas and because there is so much
food waste that we could eliminate and that would help us feed everyone.
I think it should be obvious that some parts of the world consume many times
more than they need and many times more than the environment and the economy
even can sustain and that those people really need to slow down. But that's not
true of everyone everywhere in the world. Perhaps we disagree then because we
are looking at things from a different place in the world?
I'm glad we can find common ground about the evils of factory farming. You're right, my perspective comes from America where 99% of animals are factory farmed. I do take less issue with the small scale sort of farming you describe (although personally I still wouldn't consume it, because I think food can be healthy and delicious without it).
My worry is the trend is not going in the right direction. The world is eating more and more meat, the rest of the world adopting the Standard American Diet. This level of consumption can only continue by expanding factory farming. Especially as we add a couple of billion more people over the coming decades and they want to eat meat like the rich countries do. Most people just don't care where their food comes from (not all, I take it you are among the few who do care). So the way I see it, the only way out is for people to really change how they see food and whether we should be eating animals at all. Because they're not going to take the effort to figure out where and how their meat/dairy came to be every time they eat it.
I agree that the trend is in a worrying direction. It's certainly worrying me.
I think though it'd be much harder to convince most people to give up on meat and dairy than it would be to convince them to take responsibility for their food, where it comes from and how it's grown or raised. And I think it's the people who aren't vegans who have to have this discussion. I don't mean that as an attack on vegans, but I don't think that continuing to eat meat, even in a sustainable manner, is something that agrees with vegan ideals. So it's going to have to be meat eaters who change things. Or else things won't change.
I guess I agree that most people take their food for granted. I don't know how that changes. Maybe we need a popular movement of activism from meat eaters :) I guess that sounds like a joke but there's small things like that, like the Slow Food movement. They're just not very popular...
The thing is, crabs and lobsters don't live in buckets naturally.
If you took two wild mammals and forced them to cohabit in a small area it would also very likely end in bloodshed.
Lobsters are known for having seasons in which they migrate. Even sources that say that crabs don't move a lot will describe that lack of movement as "will not exit a one mile area".
The important difference between hunting and farming is that hunting is done for sport and the people killing the animals derive pleasure from killign them. Farmed animals are killed to be eaten and no farmer derives pleasure from killing the animals they raised from babies.
So when people say they ind hunting "evil" but farming not, that's the general idea.
A quick search shows a lot of sites saying it takes about 3 minutes for death, though I don't know what the original source is. But that makes sense to me. I mean, how would boiling water cause instant death? Do you think if you were dunked in boiling water you would instantly die? Granted we don't have the same physiology as lobsters, but, what exactly is the physical mechanism that would cause instant death from 100°C water?
Brains are mostly fat... so it could be the time for enough heat to transfer into the brain for it to melt and all the neurons short out. Getting too hot is way more dangerous for your brain than getting too cold.
Some brains can also rapidly shut down consciousness in response to overwhelming pain, but I suspect that's not relevant for lobsters... getting their limbs torn off and re-growing them is a thing. If a bigger lobster rips your arm off, you'd better remember where it happened and respect their territory.
That's also what I figured does them in but I would think it'd take longer to conduct enough heat to do that. Considering cooking directions are 10+ minutes to cook through.
I find the idea that pain is something profound and not just the reception of a signal strange and based in non-scientific beliefs.
Your CPU has a temperature sensor, does that mean if you hold a flame to it and it can detect its own impending destruction, it deserves protection under the law?
Just because something has sensors somehow makes it our contemporary?
So according to your philosophy; you wouldn't object to being tortured, after all, it's just signals being registered by a biological computer in your head.
That's not their philosophy, it's the opposite of it. Their point is more in line with something like "the ability to sense pain is not related to sentience and is not special", not "if something can sense pain, it is therefore not sentient and is not special".
Billions of years of evolutionary survival instinct would have my body grasping at all straws, releasing chemicals and likely having negative affects on my physiology and mental state for the rest of my life. Clearly that isn’t anything anyone wants.
If I had no memories of the experience, and it had no long term physical affects on me, I would be indifferent, obviously, because I don't know about it.
If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death, other than for those around me. I will have no memory of the incident.
By this logic that no suffering is actionable in any fashion because all who suffer suffer temporarily. This is trivially truth in a nothing actually matters in a long enough run sort of way but not philosophically meaningful.
>> If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death...
Those minutes/hours/days spent experiencing pain do count. You speak as of the after-effects but make it seem that an advantage in living the process itself doesn't count.
That's like saying that we're all going to die anyway and there's no advantage to how we live our lives. So why bother with anything?
What reason do you have to believe otherwise. What does it count towards?
What counts is in missed opportunity. Missed abilities to affect the world around you before you leave. Pain at the very end doesn't alter that much at all.
For all you know, the whole world around you might be a figment of your big and complex imagination, and nothing you do would, in the end, affect it. So what actually matters, (in fact the only thing that matters) is your perception of the world around you (and that includes pain).
If your criteria is sentience and not ability to feel pain, then what are your thoughts on a newborn baby? Or someone with severe brain trauma? Is euthenasia ok for those born with the brain capacity of a cow or lobster? Or are you just being speciesist?
I think that pain is different from suffering. To suffer is to hold an abstract mental model of a world that could be and a world that is and experience discomfort at what is rather than merely processing a pain signal and responding with a reflex action. To suffer requires a modestly complex brain while having a reflexive response to a signal doesn't require any sort of central nervous system at all.
For context some approximations insofar as number of neurons for a rough and imperfect estimate of brain complexity
The apparent divergence of the first 2 entries whereas ants and roaches seem very stupid singly makes one wonder how many neurons exactly are needed to have a complex internal life. One would be hard pressed to imagine the single ant, roach, or bee suffers but the relatively complex behavior of the jumping spider makes it easier to imagine it suffering.
It is however easy to see there is little similarity between lobster and octopus when the latter has 500 x as many brain cells.
I was speaking against reductionism but while we are there, as your examples alude to, counting neurons to determine sentience is like counting GHz to determine computational power.
It's really not. Frequency is nearly meaningless as you can have as many computational elements as you like operating at a given frequency meaning it tells you nearly nothing. It's like counting transistors which actually DOES work even if imperfectly.
But neurons are like compitational elements. There are different sorts with different power. In fact some human neurons have features that no other neurons have.
I didn’t propose criteria, and certainly not those criteria. I don’t see sentience as anything more than highly evolved self preservation software. It’s not magic.
The fact that this is just dawning on modern society is evidence that up until just a few generations ago, people were mainly occupied with not starving to death. Indeed, some ridiculously huge number of people worries about that today as well. The fact that we're able to even contemplate not harming animals is a sign of our enormous privilege.
Does being an “antelope” somehow justify being torn apart and eaten by a lion? Yeah actually, it does because lions eat antelopes and humans eat lobsters. Nature doesn’t owe any being an existence devoid of suffering.
Lions don't boil antelopes alive, nor do they reportedly tear them apart while they're alive, instead they suffocate or sever their necks before eating them [1].
(Note: I had a lobster role for lunch two days ago, and I love them. However, these findings give me pause on eating them further.)
That’s kind of beside the point. I’m sure the process of being killed and eaten by a lion nevertheless causes “pain, distress, and harm”. These things are a part of life.
Yes, but Lions lack - for want of a better term - options, whereas we humans have plenty of options. We decide to boil living creatures alive, their feelings be damned because we like their taste better that way. But that's a very conscious choice to inflict harm. In the court of ethics the Lion was just eating, the human being was inflicting unnecessary pain.
Who decides what's necessary? It's not really "necessary" to eat a lobster at all. Maybe we should just live in mud huts, eating the bare minimum amount of soybeans and rice to keep us just alive. That would inflict the minimal amount of "unnecessary" suffering. But then, why is it even necessary that we should be alive?
All living things suffer at one point or another, whether it was necessary or not. There is no grand cosmic register that tallies up all the suffering and is going to cause something bad to happen if it gets too high. Suffering, in and of itself, is just a subjective experience that exists solely in a mind.
Empathy is that thing which makes suffering exist in your mind when it exists in others. And even among the non-sentient animals, it can extend to other species. The reason why we have to take it further than they do is because we have the mental capacity to construct a self-consistent system of ethics out of it.
We have to take it as far as emphathy combined with reason (which extends our ability to empathize) will take us, precisely because this is the only self-consistent approach other than sociopathy. If you're advocating the latter, then I'll admit that it is also fully self-consistent, and rejecting it is really just an ethical axiom that I subscribe to.
We don't need to live in mud huts, I'm pretty sure houses can be vegan. Also it doesn't need to be all or nothing, we can simply reduce suffering. I don't understand the logic of "we can't eliminate suffering, so might as well maximize suffering by boiling animals to death."
If someone actually cared about reducing suffering, there are far more egregious sources of it in the world that could be addressed. Worrying about lobsters suffering in boiling water for 2 seconds before they die is the plastic straw ban of reducing suffering.
If you don't want to boil lobsters, then don't boil lobsters. Just don't kid yourself into thinking that introducing a ban on it is some kind of great victory for reducing suffering in the world.
This is a fallacy of thinking that many people suffer from: because you are taking care of one bad thing doesn't mean you are immediately responsible for taking all bad things, conversely, that you are not able to take care of all bad things does not mean that you can ignore the one bad thing that you can take care of.
I'm surprised this is so persistent, it seems pretty obvious. If five houses are on fire and you decide to take care of one of them that's fine, even if one or two of the others are bigger and a couple are smaller. At least you're doing something rather than nothing.
It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact.
If five houses are on fire, and you decide to go organize your sock drawer... Hey, you're doing something. An organized sock drawer is surely better than a disorganized one. But you could still be rightly criticized for wasting time on something unimportant when there are bigger problems you could be attending to.
Sure, but 'lobster or no lobster' and 'boiling the lobster alive or not' is an ethical question that stands on its own, there is no need to point out that there are bigger problems than that to be able to arrive at the right answer.
Usually when people make the arguments that you make it is because they are trying to justify something in their lives, not because they are so busy to solve things that are more important. In other words: unless you are working on a plan to solve world hunger/disease/whatever you probably have no excuse to also spend some cycles on the decision of whether you want your food killed in the most cruel way that you can think of or something at least a little bit more humane.
And if you're talking about an individual making a decision to eat a lobster or not, or to kill it by jabbing a knife in its brain instead of boiling it alive sure. The cost of doing one of the other is virtually nothing, so why not do the one that involves less suffering.
But when you're talking about directing government agencies to police an entire country and inspect places to make sure they aren't boiling lobsters alive and levying and collecting fines if they are, now maybe there's something better we could be doing with that effort.
Food and safety inspections as well as animal well-being are already a thing, this would be a minor item added to a list and issuing the edict and making the public aware of it should be enough to curb the bulk of it immediately.
> It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact.
By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives. For every dollar we spend there on helping a single cancer patient etc. we could probably safe dozens of people elsewhere from dying or suffering due to lack of clean water, food, shelter, drugs, ...
So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources?
> By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives.
Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not.
I'm sure there's an optimal split between keeping prosperous countries prosperous and advancing the current frontiers of human knowledge vs. sending aid to less prosperous countries. I doubt we are at the optimum. I'm also certain the optimum is not "loot absolutely everything from prosperous places and send it to less prosperous ones".
> So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources?
Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it.
> Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not.
And that's exactly the reason why I asked you the follow up question: What is the list of things we should put our resources into then? Because I can guarantee you, that such a list would either lead to chaos, because it can't possibly consider every dependency chain and it wouldn't work with free democracies (like you'd had to forbid parties which care about seemingly less important things), or by the time you or some team of experts found the perfect solution, we could have already solved so many small and big issues.
> Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it.
You're acting like a whole country put everything to a side for a year, to figure out how lobsters won't get boiled alive, and due to it more important things got neglected.
But if you can't imagine such list yourself, then what is your solution for a society, which always works for the greater good in the most efficient way possible and who should decide what's the greater good even? Like how would it even work?
I mean people care about seemingly unimportant things, people also like to spend their time how they see fit and vote for the stuff they care about and I can't imagine a system where my local town is not allowed to care about the position of a park bench, because there's slavery going on elsewhere or the same town also has a virus outbreak in a school.
Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance.
> You're acting like a whole country put everything to a side for a year, to figure out how lobsters won't get boiled alive, and due to it more important things got neglected.
Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter.
> But if you can't imagine such list yourself, then what is your solution for a society, which always works for the greater good in the most efficient way possible and who should decide what's the greater good even? Like how would it even work?
We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.
> Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance.
No, we do the things people think are worth solving. In this case a team of scientists regarded a bill to be inconsistent with modern findings, hence they asked the government to keep up with modern science. The government, which was elected by the people, now did exactly that and made the bill more consistent with science.
And you still don't get it, no matter which problem you think is really important and really worth solving, someone will always be able to think of an even larger problem, which could be solved more efficiently. By this logic you're never going to do anything.
> Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter.
So what exactly are you asking for? Should those scientist, not work on the stuff they care about, but something more important instead? Should the government not listen to science? Or should the government not make their bills consistent? Should the government not introduce any bill at all for an issue, when someone can think of an even larger issue and who should that be?
> We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.
What costs does this action have and what would you have the people involved rather be doing?
Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action? Like the number of scientific findings alone, which first no one thought to be of any meaningful use and later revolutionized our lives in so many ways, is endless and none of them would have happened if you simply fund science by the most promising outcome.
> Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action?
And yet, we all must choose at some point to do one thing or another thing. Do you sit at home motionless all day, paralyzed by the inability to do choose the exactly most optimal action? Probably not. You make a choice based on some criteria. Is that criteria “will this make a lobster suffer for two seconds less”? I’m guessing probably not.
First of all I'm wondering where you got the two seconds from? The numbers I find online are usually around 30 seconds or more for a lobster to die in boiling water.
Since I never had to kill a lobster I obviously never had to make that decision. However most of my decisions every day are much less important and don't require much attention, like what movie will I watch that night, what will I eat, how do I name that variable, what album do I listen to next,...
But I had used a similar criteria in the past when I had to do a rather important choice: The way we treat male chicks, like whether it's ok to kill them and how, was among other things one criteria which influenced how I placed my vote (and if I should buy eggs at all and if so, which ones) .
Science is not a measuring contest where you sum up the volume of evidence. On any subject of import, it's equally easy to find 3,000 completely wrong studies as it is to find 10 valuable ones.
It's quite a leap to go from "crabs and lobsters are basically bugs" to "being a bug justify being boiled alive."
No. Please don't boil your arthropods alive. Kill your crabs and lobsters, swiftly, before cooking them. Be thankful for their sacrifice. I promise you it doesn't change the flavor or texture or nutrition.
I don't know about crabs but there's something called "high pressure lobster" where the animal is killed very swiftly through very high pressure soon on the boat. While I am not sure about this is being more humane than throwing it in boiling water (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301843) there's also the question of keeping lobsters alive for a long time all the way from catch through the market while keeping their claws tied etc.
>> the most basic consideration: that they have “the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm”.
Those crabs can dish out some pain with those pincers. They eat their prey alive too. That's not an argument for or against treating them some way, just that they aren't some poor innocent animals either.
They seem innocent to me. They’re very likely not aware of the pain they cause. They don’t weigh up moral dilemmas and discuss them. They also have no ability to choose. They can’t code for a living, can’t play piano and be vegan. They just do what instinct and physical ability does. Evolution chose what they do and they can’t interrogate it.
Experiments could probably be set up to test this but I’m not sure it’s worth it.
Yes, they are in fact innocent: they are of course “free from legal guilt or fault” but it’s the second definition from Merriam-Webster that really sums it up, “free from guilt or sin especially through lack of knowledge of evil”.
I'll go further: there are no poor innocent carnivores or omnivores. All are brutal killers without regard for the suffering of others. Nature is struggle, awful, awful struggle.
I don’t think crustaceans or insects have the capacity to suffer as a result of their extremely simple neurology and behavior. I do think octopus deserve the benefit of the doubt that they might, and if they had longer lifespans and different reproduction behaviors that there’s a good chance there would be octopus civilization.
My philosophy is humans are special because I'm human. Other animals are not the same but I'd rather not hurt them without good reason. I'm not sure it's a rational part of me, I suspect a more instinctual part that doesn't like to see an animal suffer.
Sometimes the good reason to hurt an animal is to eat them.
I've come to peace with hunting for food.
Within the realm of what many people consider “bugs”, intelligence also exists. For example, jumping spiders have intelligence similar to mammals or birds. Research is ongoing with bees and they’re seeming similarly advanced, with some having the capacity to suffer depression.
In all likelihood, there exist insects with reasonably high levels intelligence that we’ve simply overlooked for centuries. Basically everyone today knows crows and octopuses are very intelligent animals, but that definitely was not a common sentiment when I was a kid. But nobody was really paying attention to animals then beyond “pest”, “edible”, “pet”, and “looks cool.”
I really doubt a spider is as smart as me. Perhaps a contrived problem solving test proves a certain kind of spider is good at solving a certain kind of problem, but I really doubt I’d be the same with a brain as complex as a spider.
Of course they aren't comparable to humans, but some spiders are amazingly clever. For example, Portia spiders, which hunt other spiders, will apparently try different ways of manipulating the target's web, observe the target's behavior, and then adapt their manipulations to trick the target.
The link below has a giant picture of a spider, so although it is an adorable Portia, if anyone has arachnophobia they shouldn't click it:
They describe a bunch of different experiments. An interesting one was: the scientists put one type of prey in view of the spider. Then, they blocked view and either swapped they prey with something else, or left it there. Then they revealed the view again. The spiders pay more attention if the prey is a new type, which is interpreted as 'surprise' and an indication that the spider has some mental model of the world.
I mean it is a spider, so bit of a low bar to clear for intelligence, but still interesting that they are thinking about the world.
We tend to measure intelligence by human metrics so of course humans will be the most intelligent at being humans.
Taking spiders for example: humans cant spin spiderwebs for shit while this is a core skill to being a spider. From a spider centric worldview, humans must just be dumb meat factories then.
> The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill already recognises all animals with a backbone (vertebrates) as sentient beings. However, unlike some other invertebrates (animals without a backbone ), decapod crustaceans and cephalopods have complex central nervous systems, one of the key hallmarks of sentience.
It’s not that lobsters are being lumped in with octopuses, it’s that they are both being given the same treatment as anything with a backbone. That’s a pretty diverse group.
I think one is conflating superset/subset privilege granting. Humans, a subset of things with backbones, are given the privilege of describing what is considered something capable of feeling and then extended it to all creatures with a backbone. This does not mean they've extended the privilege of labeling to all things with a backbone, only that they've ascribed a certain label to all things with a backbone. Similarly, humans labeling certain non-backboned creatures in this way does not ascribe those creatures the privilege of being considered human.
Crab and lobster porn isn't really a thing, while Octopoda have a significant, lasting and ancient presence in Japanese lore, James Bond movies and whatnot.
The James Bond character was actually named after a real octopus that Ian Flemming met in Jamaica[1]. Flemming wanted to befriend it, but before he could, it was eaten by his housemaid. (Credit for this knowledge to the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast.)
"Bug," in its most common usage, is a large category that includes spiders, insects, and other arthropods. Crustaceans (which includes pill bugs a.k.a. roly polies) are arthropods.
It's not so black and white. Bug is not a scientific term (well, not in its common usage), so it has blurry boundaries. Some definitions say "insect-like", some say "small arthropod", and so on. Lobsters etc are clearly in the gray area. So "basically bugs" is pretty spot on.... it is similar to bugs in the ways that matter to the conversation.
And it isn't circular or superfluous in that conversation, since the point that they are similar to other arthropods (which we tend to not give a lot of concern to the pain they might experience), is relevant and seemed to have been missed by those passing the law.
