Lobsters: Yes it Hurts
In a wonderful article written in 2004, David Foster Wallace asked us to Consider the Lobster:
So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?
While much urban lore along with pamphlets from the Maine Lobster Promotion Council propagate the idea that lobsters do not feel pain, there is growing scientific evidence that this is simply untrue:
Ripping the legs off live crabs and crowding lobsters into seafood market tanks are just two of the many practices that may warrant reassessment, given two new studies that indicate crustaceans feel pain and stress. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that virtually all animals, including fish, shellfish and insects, can suffer.
Sadly DFW did not live long enough to see this little bit of science supporting his view as he so eloquently illustrated in that article:
However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around.
The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.
There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider. One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with—nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior.
The idea that we had managed to convince ourselves that some species had evolved without a meaningful sense of pain seems ridiculous given that all life survives around the the response to the pain/pleasure dichotomy. It is primal. To assume the imperative of this experience is proportional to brain size is convenient but is impossible to know and unlikely given that evolution would have honed every creature’s desire to avoid harm.
animals art culture food science animals David Foster Wallace lobsterThe more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing.
7 April, 2009 @ 1:01 am
I think it makes some sense to err on the side of humaneness in guessing what it’s like to be another type of creature. The way that it was once confidently stated that ‘animals’ could not feel pain ought to make us pause a moment when we find ourselves saying the same thing, about a readjusted set of animals. But there is also some risk of a kind of animistic silliness, where we go over the other high side in the opposite direction and deny again any possibility of seeing what something is because of what we would like it to be. “Fruit flies are dear little souls, not very bright, but full of their own tiny hopes and sorrows” is as solipsistic and because-I-say-so as an assertion that it’s ok to vivisect dogs because their cries are mere reflex. Both simply ignore what’s actually there and dump on a storyline wholesale.
Pain is the awareness of pain, to all intents and purposes. After a severe high spinal injury the tissues isolated from your brain still ‘feel pain’, and respond to it with the help of the spinal cord (which just on its own, is a great deal smarter than a lobster) and local signaling, but we feel no sympathy for tissues that can’t report their suffering to our awareness. During anaesthesia, tissues likewise ‘feel pain’ but we don’t care except to the extent that activated pain pathways may come back to haunt the patient’s awareness once that has returned. Pain that isn’t part of awareness is mechanical in some sense.
We could fairly easily make a robot that would avoid destructive conditions, and we could make a biological Turing test where we could go along with Wallace’s empathetic criteria and say that if a robot activates all of its motor systems at once to exhibit a crazy all-in thrashing activity in response to destructive conditions that it “takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting” not to see this as evidence of pain. But, it isn’t, of course, and in fact it takes no intellectual effort at all to dismiss it, which suggests that intellect may be misidentified in this quote. “If I were doing that, here is what I would be feeling” isn’t a very useful guide, sometimes even for other people. By this criterion, Wallace might as well feel sympathy for the poor thrashing roiling water, as the lobster that is lowered into it.
The thing is, life becomes more and more mechanical as it becomes simpler. At some point, as with Eric Kandel’s careful isolation of the pathways of integration in Aplysia, it becomes more intuitive to identify biological responses with machines – that is, with circuits and software and feedback loops – than with ‘souls’. Each blade of grass is not a little green man with his feet stuck in the earth and his face turned up to the sun. Rather, it is a very complicated chemical reaction.
And the rather confounding thing is that this is also true of ourselves. We make a fuss about pain and hold it to be self-evident that it is evil because we want to avoid it. Protecting lobsters from pain is a long and roundabout way of protecting ourselves but when all’s said and done, our pain matters no more than theirs. Our tissues don’t like being boiled and we exhibit all sorts of avoidance behaviors starting with the highly organized learning and planning afforded to a really top-of-the-line neurological system that can abstract the danger to such a degree that it can fight it in the pages of magazines and blogs, and finishing with the same last-ditch thrashing-about-when-all-else-has-failed behavior of a biological machine. But once our proteins have congealed, once the system has gone through its repertoire of self-perpetuation, the internal events that presented as ‘pain’ have run out of meaning. We are chemical machines that intertwine our biology with our humanity: what we call evil is almost always just something that threatens our biological wellbeing.
So, we have a sliding scale, with our own extremely conceptualized, hypersensitive pain at one end – the hysteria of a child about to be vaccinated, subjecting him to a degree of pain he wouldn’t even be aware of while tearing his skin on thorns in the course of play in the woods – and the mechanical withdrawal of the gill of a sea slug in response to contact at the other. Any system that has a feedback response ‘has a soul’, and anything that is alive is ‘just a machine’ depending on how you choose to look at it. In this respect, identifying ourselves with lobsters, though it seems nice, fails to distinguish why we are not like lobsters: the obverse side of misplaced sympathy is that if their pain matters as much as ours, our pain matters no more than theirs.
Without a way of understanding what pain means, or what it means to be a living machine, we can’t make any sense out of biology at all. We must worry not only about the embryos that are cruelly torn apart for stem cell research instead of receiving last rites and decent burials, but about intestinal parasites viciously poisoned in our guts (a lobster is more appealing than a hookworm perhaps, but no morally or neurologically grander) or the continued health and wellbeing of tumors that are cut from our bodies.
Indiscriminate sympathy has the powerful appeal of self-righteousness about it: arguably, the motivation behind indignation about the suffering of lobsters is to regulate the behavior of other humans rather than to protect lobsters from unpleasantness in their lives. Bad things happen in the benthos, but if we can’t find a fulcrum to lever some moral superiority we’re not much interested. PETA cares nothing for the suffering of a starfish that is inefficiently crushed and ripped apart by a lobster – that is all just ‘nature’ which we are, somehow, not part of. But the insistence that everything alive is ‘like us’, combined with the unexamined sequestration of ‘us’ from nature, leads to a kind of mindless aversive thrashing about, in which we take on the moral discrimination of a lobster, when we assume its feelings.