Some news to discomfit seafood lovers and DFW fans: There’s now “strong evidence” that lobsters, crabs, and other crustaceans can feel pain:
One way [animal behavior research Robert] Elwood attempted to determine whether crustaceans can experience pain was to look at avoidance learning: Can the animals actually learn from pain, or do they just continue to respond to a stimulus? To answer this, Elwood and his colleague Barry Magee presented shore crabs with a choice of two different shelters. Entering one shelter resulted in an electric shock for the animal, which was repeated if the animal remained there. The other shelter was a safe haven. Crabs shocked the second time the experiment was run were far more likely to choose the other shelter in the next trial, while crabs never left a non-shocking shelter. This, says Elwood, shows that the shock is aversive.
“Assessing pain is difficult, even within humans,” Elwood told the Newcastle meeting. But there is a “clear, long-term motivational change [in these experiments] that is entirely consistent with the idea of pain.” Such evidence would be enough to prevent mice being subjected to the deaths that crustaceans experience, he says.
Writing from the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival, David Foster Wallace observed that “if you permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not,” the event becomes “something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.”
The Dish 