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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the lobster-prod dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by lx on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:39PM (2 children)

    by lx (1915) on Saturday January 13 2018, @02:39PM (#621802)

    On the other hand, I have no hard guarantee that you are capable of suffering in a meaningful way, after all you might just be a bunch of spinal reflexes imitating consciousness. Does that mean that I can drop you in boiling water without feeling empathy?

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 13 2018, @05:29PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 13 2018, @05:29PM (#621861) Journal

    Empathy. OK, I'm dropped into the boiling water. There is a flash of pain, then a warm fuzzy feeling, and then nothing. That's why they drop the lobster in the pot head first - his brain solidifies not-quite-instantly. Crack an egg into boiling water. Or, don't even crack it - just drop a raw egg into boiling water. The shell will almost certainly burst, and all that protein will kinda swirl out, already solidified. If we're going to empathize, you gotta really empathize.

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:32PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:32PM (#624191) Journal

    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.