Do lobsters feel pain when boiled alive

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Lobsters flee from predators and fight and occasionally kill one another, sometimes even employing their large claws as clubs. The also have the sensory ability to detect information from their feelers and to know when they’ve made contact with the ground or torn flesh free from their prey.

It’s funny that the only animals that anyone ever supposes don’t feel pain are those incapable of visibly registering it, such as fish and shellfish. I would imagine that if these types of creatures had expressive faces and/or vocal ability you’d find that they feel pain aplenty.

They are pretty smart too, or at least smarter than given credit for. I once observed a little battle going on in a fish tank at Wal-Mart where a minnow-sized fish was trying to overturn a crab whose body was about as big around as a quarter. The crab had initially seized another minnow-sized fish and was casually ripping off and eating parts of the the fish’s tailfin. Eventually the fish broke free, and raced to the surface to gulp air. At about this time one of its brethren decided to take action and began taking running starts to dart underneath the crab and try to flip it over. The crab, for its part, would turn to face the fish with its largest claw held high in an attempt at intimidation. The fish would dart from a sufficient distance to build up enough speed so that it couldn’t be grasped, and the crab was able to extend its legs enough to let the fish pass without quite knocking it over. I saw this little scenario take place three or four times before I had to leave and I don’t know who eventually won, but I would imagine the fish did because the crab was having a hard time staying upright and had no realistic chance at catching the fish.

That episode taught me that even tiny little fish are capable of observing danger and taking intelligent steps (it obviously understood enough of physics to know that swooping under the crab at high speed would make it virtually impossible for the crab to catch it and would also likely result in the crab being overturned and rendered helpless) to deal with it.

Another time I observed a wasp go into absolute panic when it returned to the location of its nest and eggs only to find them missing. I was painting the exterior trim at my parents’ house and had removed the nest and thrown it away, and was working about eight feet from the spot where they were when the wasp returned. It absolutely went crazy, buzzing around and around trying to grasp why its nest and eggs weren’t where they were supposed to be. Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to equate me with the problem and never came near to attacking me, and I actually found myself feeling sort of sorry for the little creature.

All in all, I think most living creatures above the bacterial stage are much smarter and feel more in the way of pain and emotion than we like to give them credit for.

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Feeling pain is one thing, but suicide!? :wink:

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:smiley:

Seriously though, I think the poor thing was running an oxygen deficit due to stress and being held in one place for so long. And, given that 2/3 of its tail fin was gone, I doubt that it survived.

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Not being a huge fan of seafood, I am mildly astonished that this question hasn’t been answered more definitively. Philosophical definitions of pain aside, I would have thought that a lobster would typically react fairly violently to being boiled. Yet such seems not to be the case.

I mean, when an insect is coated with bug spray, they seem unequivocally distressed by the experience. But it sounds like boiling water doesn’t register in the same manner with lobsters? I know that behavior is often an indication of whether an animal is feeling pain, so it seems strange that a lobster wouldn’t show an unambiguously agonistic response to being boiled.

Maybe their sensory nerves simply don’t have the capacity to feel heat that intense? They are sea creatures after all; there’d be no opportunity for them to suddenly encounter temperatures that high in nature. So perhaps lobsters have the capacity to feel certain kinds of pain, but not this particular kind?

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[Bart Simpson]
If they don’t, I’ve wasted a lot of my life
[/Bart Simpson]

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On the other hand, I was expecting something a bit more from you than a comedy routine (“I am Iron Man. I no longer experience pain from third degree burns”), not to mention “I do believe” and “my gut tells me” as support for speculations (on a subject that is admittedly of less than cosmic importance for most people not belonging to PETA).

So a flimsy post gets an apropos response. Deal with it.

You may want to reconsider your belief that slamming a knife blade through the head of a lobster is a humane way to rapidly kill it. What if you’re just paralyzing it, then tossing a paralyzed crustacean into a pot of boiling water?

I may have to tattle on you to Ingrid Newkirk. And that could have painful results. :frowning:

But certainly tastier, plus they don’t short out when dipped in melted butter.

In terms of inflicting distress on “lower” animals, what bothers me far, far more than boiling lobsters is thinking about the fate of those tortoises that old-time sailors used to collect on the Galapagos Islands, then transport on board ship for long periods for use as food. I don’t like to think about those poor tortoises, slowly starving to death in miserable conditions. They may not have experienced what we regard as pain, but that was highly cruel to my thinking.

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Every lobster I’ve ever dropped into a pot of boiling water has thrashed violently for the first few minutes.

Horses don’t have culture, not as you mean it here, yet they “share the conceit” that experiencing pain should be avoided: Once having been zapped by an electric fence, for example, they will assiduously avoid any subsequent contact with such sources of noxious stimulus, and they are capable of extrapolating the presence of the threat from the original fence to all other electrical fences.

Baloney. Go watch a horse with founder or severe navicular syndrome try to walk. The animal doesn’t need any faculty of human ratiocination to know that IT FRIKKIN HURTS LIKE HELL every time it tries to put weight on its feet, and its body language screams the truth of that.

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Thanks for the cite. Rather than “Shutting down” my "fallacious " line of reasoning, it supports it:

“he gate control theory of pain describes how the perception of pain is not a direct result of activation of nociceptors, but instead is modulated by interaction between different neurons, both pain-transmitting and non-pain-transmitting. In other words, the theory asserts that activation, at the spine level or even by higher cognitive brain processes, of nerves or neurons that do not transmit pain signals can interfere with signals from pain fibers and inhibit or modulate an individual’s experience of pain.”

Thanks.

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I suppose that would be a reasonable response except for the fact that in your critique you completed ignored the part where I backed up my statements with a cite from an MIT professor who is a pioneer in the field.

Seeing as I’ve cut it’s brain in half lengthwise, pulping it in the process, I’m pretty sure it’s dead.

I tend to agree.

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IIRC, they were kept from moving around by virtue of having ropes run through holes that were punched in their flippers and which no doubt caused constant soreness and pain.

I should also point out that according to one account I heard of from a person who witnessed it, lobsters’ tails and claws are twisted off while they’re still alive and their soon to be dead carcases are then thrown back into the sea or onto a heap for disposal later.

The ability of human beings to so thoughtlessly and without care inflict so much pain on other creatures, human and otherwise, is easily the most distasteful aspect of the human condition to my mind.

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First off, horses are herd animals and they do have “culture” as I mean it here. I have a standing bet concerning the electric fence around my horse field. I will give $100 to anybody who will grab it… twice. So far nobody’s taken my money.

On the other hand, contrary to what you’ve written, the horses routinely test the fence to see if it’s on. As I rotate them about the field they naturally want to go to the part is recovering and lush and green. The part that is fenced of. They test it, and get shocked all the time and if I forget to turn it on they’ll be in the fresh area in a matter of hours.

On the other hand, once somebody grabs my fence they just can’t make themselves do it again on purpose.

Now, there are several possible explanations i.e. horses are dumb and forget. But the one I think makes sense is that horses don’t really assign the importance to pain that we do.

You may be right. You may also be anthropomorphizing. I am pretty sure that a horse feels a physical sensation pretty much identical to what we feel with a similarly injured limb resulting in the same physiological response, i.e “favoring” it.

Brainwise, what’s going on may be a bit different than the emotional “pain, suffiering” we feel.

We had a mare that had a deep fistular delivery. It was not reparable, yet it was necessary to keep her alive until her foal could be weaned. Her physiological state was such that would probably be considered constant agony by a human. Her response to the physiological sensation was not analagous to “pain” in a human. The fistular deliver meant her birth canal was ripped into her bowel so that there was fecal contamination internally and a constant severe infection. Clearly, what we as a human would consider “pain.”

Now, I believe that this horse suffered. I think that’s plain. However, I think it did so without the same emotional/cognitive component that we have.

With navicular, the cues the animal gives are close to what we would imagine ourselves doing if we had a similar injure. The “limping” is necessary to keep weight off an injured limb. Because both we and a horse would limp in the same fashion with a similar injury we are quick to attribute an equivalent emotional response.

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Which is exactly the sort of reaction I’d expect to occur. Yet teela brown reported the opposite response, which makes me wonder what the hidden variable is. Are they different kinds of lobsters, maybe? Or were they treated differently in some way prior to boiling?

Possibly the two of you simply have different ideas of what constitutes “violent thrashing” as opposed to “just sitting there.” Or maybe teela brown is somehow able to induce a profound state of fatalistic equanimity in lobsters. I have much the same effect on my co-workers.

I suppose that, with a little searching, I could locate video clips of lobsters being boiled on YouTube or wherever, to get some idea of how they react. However I find myself a bit too squeamish and/or lazy to follow through on this plan, so I guess I’ll just take the less scientific route of continuing to not boil lobsters. I’m a lousy researcher, I admit it. If humanity one day discovers miraculous technological advances through the study of lobster abuse, it will be no thanks to me.

Some people had a favorite toy doll or stuffed animal as a kid; I had a rubber lobster. Fortunately, nobody ever told me that his handsome red color meant he’d been cooked already.

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jackmanni:

I’ve experienced more than my share of physical pain. I’ve had third degree burns on large portions of both hands, and I spent two weeks at the Shriner’s children’s hospital in Boston because of it. Those two weeks were pretty much constant agony, and the next four weren’t that much better.

If possible, they wish to avoid addiction to narcotics in children. There are limits to what they can give you, and they want you to be able to handle as much pain as you can.

They know an awful lot about pain in the burn unit of Shriner’s Children’s hospital. They know that if they can disconnect that emotional cognitive response to what is occuring than the “pain” felt is much less.

As a 13 year old, magicians and people in Dinosaur costumes didn’t really do it for me. But, they had several other tricks up their sleeves. The greatest of these was Meredith. Meredith could have starred in an 80s MTV video. She was incredibly hot.

I noticed that if I was having a real bad time of it Meredith would tend to show up and talk to me, and flirt with me salaciously. This sufficiently distracted me from the pain.

The sensation of what you feel is highly dependent upon the importance you attach to it. When Meredith was around my priorities were reshifted and my suffering was less, or even completely gone.

It can be done with a book, by playing chess, talking sports, watching a guy in dinosaur costume, or what have you. The worse the potential pain, the higher the demand it places on you for attention.

When things were bad enough that chess, sports, dinosaurs, etc, could no longer cutting it, they brought out the nuclear bomb of attention getting/distractions. Meredith.
What I’m trying to say, and what Minsky is saying is that while I’m sure the stimulus/response to damage is probably largely identical between lobsters, horses, and humans, what we thing of as “pain” is largely an emotional/contextual response. Lobsters and horses having less sophisticated/different emotional response are experiencing something different than we are when we are in distress. My experience is that the more higher cognitive functions that are involved, than the worse it is.

In running ultras I find that if you let yourself think about or focus on how bad it hurts, than you are pretty like to slow down or stop. Whereas, if you don’t let yourself engage the sensation it’s not as much an issue.

I know for a fact that people can run past pain to the point where their bodies actually fail. The legs won’t straighten no matter want and they can no longer put one leg in front of the other. You have to go through a ton of suffering to get to that point of physiological failure. You can’t do it if you are engaging the pain. An ultra-runner isn’t usually trying to “tough it out” of “fight through the pain.” That can get you another 100 yards, not another ten miles. The best analogy that I can come up with is that it’s like a fart at a polite party. Nobody acknowledges it.

It is for me anyway.

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One of the important aspects of this question is the thermal gradient within the lobster as it comes up to temperature. Nerves fail above a certain temperature, which is much lower than the temperature of boiling water. (Probably around 120 F or so). So the area with nerves that are still capable of emitting pain signals will lie in a small band of temperature that is higher than the pain threshold and lower than the temperature at which the nerves fail. When first dropped in the pot, we would expect any nerves close to the surface to become instantly non-functional. As the heat soaks deeper into the lobster, and the insulation of the shell slows down the rate of temperature rise, some nerves may be in the painful temperature region for however long it takes for the temperature to rise enough to stop them. The lobster’s “brain” is located in something called the supraesophageal ganglion, which is located right about where you’d expect, between eyes and the esophagus. The speed with which this part of the lobster reaches a temperature high enough to shut down the nerves is probably on the order of a fraction of a second, during which it is unlikely that any distant sensory information has even arrived, much less been processed. The muscles of the lobster may continue to thrash as their nerves are buried much deeper and will rise in temperature more slowly. But the nerve signals from these overheating muscle nerves are not being received by the already overheated brain. Any thrashing is purely involuntary and reflexive.

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Can we do better than guessing, about such a topic?

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From the way we treat animals in some cases, I’d surely hope they don’t have the same cognitive processes we have.

Which reminds me of the old joke;

A man sees a camel herder castrating one of his animals by clapping two bricks upon its testicles, and asks, “Does that hurt?”.

“Only if I trap my thumb.” replied the camel herder.

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I’ve gotta basically side with Scylla on this one. From a purely evolutionary viewpoint there would seem to be little point in lobsters feeling pain.

Pain exists as a means of preventing an orgnisms higher brain centres from causing damage from overruling its reflexes. That’s real important in “higher” animals because we have the sufficently organised brains that allow us to sometimes choose whether we follow our instincts or not. A dog for example might make a choice that the risk from hunting on an injured limb outweighs the risk of starving to death.

Pain exists as the ultimate failsafe, a way to ensure that the animal doesn’t make decisions to overrule instinct lightly. It is absolutely a negative emotion precisely because it must be able to make bad decisions into negative events.

But that kind of risk benefit anlaysis is pretty high level functioning. It’s not something that a lobster is even remotely capable of as far as we can tell. For animals like lobsters it is sufficient that an instinct cuase an appropriate reaction because they have no abilityto overrrule instinct.

So a lobster certainly has neurons capable of interpreting damage and sending signals that cause withdrawal. But there is no evidence that lobsters can actually feel pain.

I’m not sure I agree with Scylla that mammals such as horses don’t feel pain as clearly as humans. Mammals clearly can overcome their instinctive fears via their higher brain centres, which is why wild animals can be taught to live harmoniously with their natural prey, for example. So it would seem that they would also need some sort of mechanism for sensing pain in precisely the same way that humans do.

That doesn’t necessrailymean they experience pain in the same way as humans. Just that they feel it the same way. There is a subtle difference between those two. And I think this may be what Scylla means.

A young child when injured, or simply frightened, screams like all hell because they feel the pain very intensely. As we grow older we can shrug off pain that would have paralysed us as children even though, as far as we can tell, the pain is felt the same way. That’s because as we egt older we learn what pain is actually damaging and we learn to ignore the pain that isn’t truly damaging. As far as we can tell the pain sensation is identical at all ages, it is purely the perception that changes.

And I can only assume that animals also experience pain very differently to humans. Indeed it’s hard to imagine the evolutionary benefit to most animals in being able to experience pain as humans do. The humans pain experience is really good for an organism that can be cared for by other organmisms and that functions by finding alternative solutions to problems. It is also only possible for it to be experienced by an organism that has a stongly develop sense of time. For other animals the human pain experiecne would seem to be as counter-productive as humans experiencing sunlight the way that cockroaches do.

That is not to say that other mammals feel less pain than humans do. In many situations they may well feel more pain. But we need to be very careful assuming absolute equivalence in any area. And that means we shouldn’t assume that what is painless for us must be painless for animals, as much as assuming that what is painful for us must be painful for animals.

As Scylla notes animals in conditions that should cause suffering often exhhibit apparently ambivalent behaviour. The reason for this is that prey animals like horses have evolved to cover up any signs of weakness because that makes them a target. Many ethoolgists wil tell you that this does not indicate that they aren’t experiencing pain.

However I think that afar stronger position is held by the minority who point out that if prey can never act on their pain they couldn’t evolve the ability to experience that pain in the first place. To an animal incapbale of acting on their pain, the experience of pain can only ever be a distraction with no benefits at all since they can never show the injury by retsing, favoring injured parts etc. This becomes more obviously true the more intensely the pain is experienced. In situations as Scylla describes with his mare, if the experience were as debilitatingly painful for the horse as it would be for a human in the same situation, the horse would be incapable of spotting predators or feeding itself. Since neither of those is beneficial to survival and since the pain itself can never lend any survival benefit the ability to experience pain is an evolutinary negative and could never have evolved.

So while I don’t agree with Scylla that animals never experience pain equivalent to the worst human pain, I agree that it is far less common to most animals. I also suspect that it occur sin situations that we ourselves would consider uncomfortable rather than painful.

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Where does this happen? For processing lobster going into prepared foods? Because most restaurants use live lobster. You pick your dinner from a tank.

Not that it is specifically human. Name a predator that gives one iota how much pain its prey feels.

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:rolleyes:

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It IS specifically human. We are the only creature that has any consideration for how the food on their plate came about…well, some of us, anyway. How many people would be having chicken wings tonight, if someone hadn’t already ripped them off for us?