animal cruelty hypocrisy
The other day, I was in a Whole Foods market, where they carry squids and several octopus salads and such. Because I was curious if the squid were locally caught (e.g. L. Opalscens) or Atlantic squids shipped frozen or something, I asked some random hippy-girl employee if she knew anything about them. She said that she didn't know, but she was sure they were "humanely caught" because they have now stopped carrying live lobsters because it's cruel (probably this is related to PETA's push for not boiling lobsters). I mentioned that I thought it was rather dubious to question boiling an animal known to have a pretty simplistic nervous system, yet chopping up an animal that's about as smart as a cat and putting it in a salad.
I'm not really all that picky about killing animals and eating them, and I'm even a bit dubious about "how much they suffer as they die" arguments, since I actually think it's worse to subject animals to long-term suffering than it is to subject them to quick-and-painful death, although I'd prefer to aim for "quick and painless."
Googling for information about lobster nervous systems, there appears to be a lot of posturing and very little actual data on the web (or maybe it's just that the "top" results are only PETA propoganda, lobster fishing industry propoganda, and very specific scientific papers that don't say much about "awareness of pain" or whatever.) I knew some people who worked on lobster stomatogastric ganglia as simple CPG (central pattern generator) models, and they seemed pretty convinced that lobsters were really, really dumb, and I don't think they had any compunctions about boiling and eating them. I know stomatopods (and maybe arguably bees) show that some arthropods have a fair bit of intelligence, but I don't see much evidence that lobsters deserve better treatment than cephs.
I'm not really intending to take a position on killing animals for food, mostly pointing out that it's a stupid argument that it somehow is less ethical to boil a lobster or crab than it is to kill fish and cephs by pulling them out of the water and asphyxiating them, and I suspect that cephs and fish, since if nothing else they've been shown to be able to learn, have an experiential rather than merely reacationary interpretation of the world.
I have some friends who think it builds character to raise their own rabbits and kill them for food, since buying a steak at the supermarket insulates people from the reality of where the food comes from. Personally, I find that I'm aware enough without that, but they make a good point... if you're going to live by eating the flesh of other animals, it's a little weird to be squeemish about it. The octopus is dead whether it was caught on a fishing boat, chopped up, and thrown into a salad, or it was impaled on a chopstick and stuffed into your mouth, right? And it's not as if cephalopods show much mercy to their lunch... Although cephalotoxin probably makes any awareness that crustaceans have go away pretty much immediately. On the other hand, a blue-ring eating a fish would probably cause paralysis without impacting awareness as in humans, since the TTX doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier into the CNS (I don't think crustaceans have a blood-brain barrier, so this wouldn't apply to them)
I guess the essential issue for me is that I think that animals that are demonstrably self-aware should not be made to suffer if it's avoidable, so I have little problem with eating live oysters or plants, which I consider to be pretty much certainly unaware, but I think cows and octopuses and chickens should be given some quality of life and quick-and-painless death. Lobsters are in a grey area, as far as I'm concerned-- I'm curious if Neogonodactylus thinks lobsters deserve the same treatment based on his stomatopod research?
In fact, I'm curious if stomatopods have a central brain, or just a bunch of distributed ganglia like a lot of inverts. I was under the impression that most arthropods have no brain per se at all, and just have a bunch of ganglia that do local computation. Whether this means they don't deserve to be considered "aware of suffering" or not is an open question, though...
I suspect that many of the people who worry about how much a lobster suffers in boiling water aren't too concerned about stepping on cockroaches, swatting flies, killing spiders, and whatnot, so a lot of this argument seems pretty questionable...
