The cruelty of boiling lobsters alive!

Sensitive chefs, avert your eyes now. An investigation into the most contentious of kitchen dilemmas has reached its unpalatable conclusion: lobsters do feel pain.

The question of crustaceans' ability to experience pain has become an unlikely obsession for some scientists. Over the past few decades, the question has been batted back and forth as fresh evidence comes to light. Two years ago, Norwegian researchers declared the answer was a firm no, claiming the animals' nervous systems were not complex enough.

The latest salvo, published in New Scientist today, comes from Robert Elwood, an expert in animal behaviour at Queen's University, Belfast. With help from colleagues, he set about finding an answer by daubing acetic acid on to the antennae of 144 prawns.

Immediately, the creatures began grooming and rubbing the affected antenna, while leaving untouched ones alone, a response Prof Elwood says is "consistent with an interpretation of pain experience". The same pain sensitivity is likely to be shared by lobsters, crabs and other crustaceans, the researchers believe.

Prof Elwood says that sensing pain is crucial even for the most lowly of animals because it allows them to change their behaviour after damaging experiences and so increase their chances of survival.

The claim will add weight to campaigns by animal rights organisations which protest against lobsters being boiled alive.

But 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."

Richard Chapman, from the University of Utah's pain research centre in Salt Lake City, stressed that most animals possessed receptors which responded to irritants. "Even a single-cell organism can detect a threatening chemical gradient and retreat from it," he said. "But this is not sensing pain."

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.

Tallon wrote: »

Of course they feel pain... poor buggers

Whispered wrote: »

How somebody can look at their dinner moving around and say "that one" is beyond me.

C&#250 wrote: »

Why is it questionable whether they feel pain or not?

g'em wrote: »

Basic physiology. Lobsters don't have the neural capacity to feel pain. They can respond to stimuli, but they can't process a stimulus as being painful.

CJhaughey wrote: »

Lobsters are wired differently, How often do you see a Dog with multiple legs torn off in a fight eating a dinner normally?
Lobsters routinely fight and rip limbs off each other and continue normally, Life in the ocean is a tough place.

g'em wrote: »

It's very hard to prove that any organism can 'feel' anything when it has no ability to communicate with us. All we can do is study its physiology, its responses and make educated best-fit guesses at to what is really going on - science is essentially based on theory after all.

In the case of invertebrates who have even fewer abilities to communicate than higher animals (who can express distress by means of calls or howls or other behavioural indications) all we can really do is compare their responses. It's not perfect but it's the only means that we have. So if you want to find evidence that proves that lobsters either feel pain or don't feel pain then you'll be looking for a long time. But then you can go back to your own assertion that we should assume that they do.

There is, of course, a benefit to pain - it enhances perception of danger, but the absence of it doesn't mean that an organism is not evolutionarily disadvantaged. If that were the case ameoba and other simple animals wouldn't exist.

Also, pain in itself is subjective - we, as humans, interpret pain in a certain way, but we can't be sure that this is the very same way that other animals feel it. Humans feel pain differently between themselves too.

I don't have a link to show that lobsters can't feel pain - papers are scant on the whole idea of invertebrates experiencing such a sensation as it's been largely widely accepted that due to their much reduced neural capacity it seems almost impossible for them to 'feel' something as subjective as pain as we do. They have the receptors for it (nociceptors) but not the brain power to interpret it.

I did however find the article that keeps being referred to in one of hte links about that suggests that hermit crabs experience pain (as displayed by applying electrical shocks to their shells) and there's the article from a lab in Queens that suggests that prawns can feel pain as interpreted by their behaviour following noxious stimulation.

So perhaps my mind is being slightly changed on this - but I'm still highly dubious about the whole idea of what kind of 'pain' it is that's elicited. Lobsters have approx. 100,000 neurons compared to our own 10 billion. I'm very wary about anthropomorphising such a subjective phenomenon when all we can go in is ultimately incomparable behaviours. Where does distress stop and pain begin?