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Animal Person

Mary Martin, Ph.D., deconstructs the language, ethics and economics of our relationship with nonhuman animals.
November 11, 2007
The Lobster Question

People really don't want to stop eating lobsters. I can thankfully say I've never eaten one, but perhaps if I had, I too would be on an endless quest to prove that they do not in fact feel pain when they are tossed into a pot of boiling water. All of that noise and activity must have a better explanation than: they're suffering gravely as they needlessly die for your palate. Maybe they're dancing, who knows?

Oh, but wait. In "Blow for fans of boiled lobster: crustaceans feel pain, study says," The Guardian's Ian Sample reports a stunning new development. Contrary to what foodies worldwide would like to believe, Robert Elwood, an expert in animal behavior at Queen's University in Belfast, has concluded that lobsters do indeed sense pain.

But that's not the shocking part. The shocking part is how he and his colleagues discovered this startling bit of information: they daubed acetic acid on the antennae of prawns to see if they'd demonstrate pain sensitivity, which would be shared by lobsters, crabs, and other crustaceans.

And guess what? Just like when they're being boiled alive, they provide a response "consistent with an interpretation of pain experience."

So it's over, right? To figure out whether they sense pain we give them a different kind and discover that being boiled alive probably isn't comfortable for them.

But wait . . .

Conscientious eaters need not, necessarily, abandon lobster. Other scientists believe the debate is far from over. Many think only vertebrates have advanced enough nervous systems to feel pain, and suspect that the prawns' reaction to having acid daubed on their antennae was an attempt to clean them.

"Shrimps do not have a recognisable brain," said Lynne Sneddon, a Liverpool University researcher who has studied pain in fish. "You could argue the shrimp is simply trying to clean the antenna rather than showing a pain response."

Prof Elwood insists such arguments are flawed. "Using the same analogy, one could argue crabs do not have vision because they lack the visual centres of humans," he said. He urged further work looking at whether crustaceans have the neurological architecture to feel pain.

What I don't understand is why we cannot err on the side of caution. When someone looks and sounds like he's writhing in pain, and tries with everything he's got to escape the situation, that's good enough for me. If it's not necessary for me to put him in that situation and risk that he may indeed be suffering a most unspeakable death, it is simply not right do so. Why can't we just stop all of the extra, supposedly debate-ending torture (which I'm certain is not over), and just call it a day and leave the lobsters alone?