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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: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday January 13 2018, @08:16PM (7 children)
No. The observation that animals can suffer comes from my many decades of direct and careful observation of, and interaction with, cats, dogs, other pets, farm animals and humans.
We are animals. In any case, we certainly have enough of an idea. Non-human animals react pretty much the same way we do when injured, within the limits of their ability to express themselves.
That assumption is outright baseless WRT to capacity to suffer, and those who use it that way, as a foundation for their actions, are operating without a clue.
We don't know in any detail at what level some form of consciousness is no longer present. Clearly, for cats and dogs, consciousness is present; it seems exceedingly unlikely that it is present in a blade of grass, but entirely possible that it is present in a lobster, which interacts with its environment in a much more sophisticated manner. The bottom line though, is that we don't know, and so my takeaway is that we should assume it is, so as to not cause needless conscious suffering. All of which doesn't address the possibility that consciousness may not even be required in order to suffer.
Very easily: You start with the certain knowledge that you can't be sure it isn't aware of its circumstance, and then you act in order to prevent yourself from causing the potential problem. If you're in a hotel room with a gun, you won't shoot a gun through the wall, because although you're not sure there's someone in the path of the bullet, you don't know, and so you elect not to take the chance of shooting anyone. This is simple sanity based on lack of knowledge. Same thing for animal suffering: if you don't know, you should not act in such a way that your lack of knowledge corrupts your actions.
It comes down to knowing, or not knowing. Until we know – and we most certainly do not for lower animals, although we just as certainly do for higher ones - the high ground is clearly not to do things that would cause suffering if the animal actually has the capacity to suffer. Don't shoot through hotel room walls.
I say we do have a good reason. If we don't make that assumption, we may be acting in an evil manner - shooting the person in the next hotel room. That's not okay. If we refrain, then we are sure to not be acting in an evil manner in this regard - just we are sure not to shoot someone on the other side of a hotel room wall if we never fire a gun in a hotel room.
If it turns out that in fact, there is no consciousness present in some set of lower animal life forms, no harm was done by refraining from damaging them while they are (were) living. Turns out that there is (was) consciousness, much less harm was done. So clearly, at least to me, the only correct path is to refrain from causing living animals damage.
Whereas if you do damage them, if they are not conscious, no harm done; if they are conscious, then harm was done.
So the former approach is clean regardless of outcome; the latter clean in only one of the two outcomes. That leaves only one certain path free of having been an asshole, and that's the one I choose.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:32PM
Very well put.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by Barenflimski on Sunday January 14 2018, @12:15AM
Well Spoken
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday January 15 2018, @12:03PM (4 children)
Good post. My one issue:
Not really. Our efforts to avoid cruelty are costly. Free range food is far more expensive, and consumes more land, etc. If our tradeoffs are grounded on what turns out to be the false assumption that chickens can suffer, then we've cost ourselves in the process.
(I'm ignoring that free range is higher quality, but nitpicking the specific example isn't the point. Ultimately, there's a tradeoff going on here.)
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday January 15 2018, @07:01PM (3 children)
You're talking about an entirely different kind of harm. My position is that imposing suffering on A cannot be excused by earning, or saving, money by B.
"Tradeoffs" at the non-consensual expense of others are actually exercises of abuse. To the extent they can be avoided, they should be avoided.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday January 15 2018, @08:46PM (2 children)
Not really. If our efforts to minimise animal suffering are in fact misguided, then we've paid a human price for nothing. That's all I'm saying.
I've seen a very similar fallacy with global warming: Maybe man-made climate-change is real, maybe not. If it is, we'll be glad we acted. If not, we lose nothing.
It's nonsense, of course. We pay a huge price in our efforts against man-made climate change, such as insisting that third-world countries don't build coal-powered power plants. (Of course, the important point in that case is that there's no real question about man-made climate-change anyway.)
How on Earth can you think I was suggesting otherwise? Are you deliberately talking past me? I quoted you very specifically.
Obviously... Did you not read what I wrote?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday January 15 2018, @10:56PM (1 child)
I'll bite. Elaborate, please: What human price will we have paid?
It is idiocy to build coal-fired power plants at this point in time, or to encourage same, knowing what we now know about the consequences - quite aside from the speculations about the potential consequences of rising CO2 levels - that coal burning brings about, as well as the presently growing ability to go in other directions.
100 years ago, we really didn't know that coal was as bad as it is. Now we do. The human price we've paid was based on ignorance initially, and social momentum later. We should stop paying it ASAP. We certainly shouldn't encourage others to follow in those footsteps.
I don't disagree that there are human costs lurking in this issue, but abandoning coal-fired power generation isn't one of them. That's a gold-plated benefit. Those countries would be far better off building power infrastructure using modern decentralized, low ongoing-pollution generating tech such as solar. For one thing, the infrastructure costs are largely decentralized, or can be, and for another, that means that they are much more easily approached incrementally, and for another, they are much faster, albeit inherently uneven, to establish.
What we should be doing, and really aren't doing near as much of as we should, is developing energy storage solutions faster. Lithium batteries aren't going to be doing anyone any favors in the long run, for example.
That's how I read it, honestly. I went back, and that's still how I read it. You are welcome to elaborate and correct my misunderstanding(s.) I do not claim to always accurately get the point of everything I read.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday January 16 2018, @09:50AM
Fewer people will be eating what they like - lobster - now that this law has passed. The chefs that continue to offer it will be inconvenienced by the new requirements. If the assumption that lobsters can suffer, is mistaken, then there's been a small human cost paid for nothing.
Some people like wearing fur, and hunting foxes with a pack of blood-crazed dogs, but we stop them doing both in our effort to minimise animal suffering.
Some British vegetarians and Hindus got awfully worked-up [theguardian.com] about the use of a microscopic amount of animal fat in the UK's new paper money. Their displeasure is, really, the result of the assumption that animals have moral status.
To be absolutely clear, I think it would be absurd to suggest that animals don't have moral status. My point is that you seem to think that significant movements like this are otherwise totally cost-free. Not so. It would in many ways be far easier for society if animals weren't conscious.
Cruel farming practices are the most economically efficient. Sadly we've not really pushed the trade-off very far there, as many factory-farmed animals have an awful existence.
I thought I was clear that this was just an example. I also thought I was clear that I'm not actually pro-coal.
I don't care about the nuances of global power-generation, my point is that if the downsides of coal power somehow turned out not to exist, we'd have been really holding back a number of countries in insisting they reject coal power. The same applies to animal welfare.