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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: 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.