You can no longer boil a lobster alive in Switzerland, unless you stun it first:
The Swiss government has ordered an end to the common culinary practice of throwing lobsters into boiling water while they are still alive, ruling that they must be knocked out before they are killed.
As part of a wider overhaul of Swiss animal protection laws, Bern said that as of 1 March, "the practice of plunging live lobsters into boiling water, which is common in restaurants, is no longer permitted". Lobsters "will now have to be stunned before they are put to death," the government order read.
According to Swiss public broadcaster RTS, only electric shock or the "mechanical destruction" of the lobster's brain will be accepted methods of stunning the animals once the new rule takes affect.
Also at BBC.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:32PM
No "hard guarantee," true... If you are willing to go down the road to solipsism.
My assumption when I posted initially in a thread about philosophy is that some here might be familiar with basic philosophical literature on this issue, such as Thomas Nagel's seminar essay, "What is it like to be a bat?"
There are certainly objections to his essay, but my main point was about the use of terms like "empathy" and "suffering" which presume an ability of a human mind to comprehend what it may be like to experience the subjective world as a lobster might. It seems like a reasonable supposition that a lobster experiences "pain" and on that argument alone we may alter our behavior toward them. But claiming that we can feel "empathy" or understand how exactly they might experience "suffering" is a much greater epistemological and psychological leap. That was my point.