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A new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology revealed some equally terrible news for shellfish and Red Lobster enthusiasts alike: crabs experience pain.
The existence of pain in crustaceans is a notoriously debated subject; while some say the process of cooking shellfish alive is harmless, others maintain its inhumanity. Mostly due to the manner in which their brief life in captivity gets boiled away before their very eyes as they (tastily) pass on. And since crabs naturally seek dark hideaways, Professor Robert Elwood from the Queen’s University Belfast decided that the best way to determine whether crustaceans experienced pain would be to see if an electric jolt was enough of a deterrent to steer crabs from their natural desire for cover.
In the study, 90 crabs were individually dumped into a tank with two lovely plots of dark, protective real estate, one of which delivered an unpleasant electric shock to its new resident. The crabs who picked the painful hideaway would be removed, given time to reflect on their poor life choices, and dropped back in for round two. Most still chose their initial home regardless of shock factor on the second try, but in the third round, almost all of the electrocuted crabs went looking for other options.
According to Elwood, the crabs’ quickly learned shock avoidance provides clear evidence of their unfortunate ability to feel pain. One bright spot in this less than pleasant news: tastiness levels continue to remain unaffected. [The Journal of Experimental Biology]
Image: Shuttershock/Anan Kaewkhammul
Years ago my Mum was at a friends house who’s boyfriend was a chef. He had 2 live lobsters and put them in a boiling pan. The noise was terrible, screeching coming from the pan.
The boyfriend said it was air escaping from the lobster. Maybe he was wrong. This’ll cheer her up in the morning.
Of course its air escaping, it’s not like they have vocal chords.
Ok, not screaming but they breath so if in pain I assume they let out pain through their mouths.
Ummm, something like that.
No, just no. They don’t scream, but they do feel pain.
No, Lobsters breathe through gills located beneath the shell on both sides of their thorax. They do not have lungs and as mentioned by dbltax they do not have vocal cords.
But if you play the screams backwards you can hear them calling “help me”!
Wait, you mean animals don’t like being boiled alive!?
THIS IS MADNESS !
THIS IS LOBSTER!
No, this is Patrick
c-c-c-c-c-combo breaker — and a buzzkill
I don’t get why people don’t just quickly kill it with a knife, I mean how fresh do you want it? You accept eating all other kinds of food that has probably been picked 2 weeks before you buy it and has loads of chemicals to keep it fresh.
In fact don’t eat shellfish at all, it isn’t worth it, you get the smallest amount of meat for the effort.
£1 Rustlers burger, all you need, if that cunt of a gf wants any more than that then tell her to pay for it and fuck off.
Something you want to get off your chest bud?
When I trained to be a chef a few years ago we were taught to kill (very quickly) lobsters and crabs before we started cooking them.
The idea of boiling them is that they are supposed to go from very cold to very hot which pretty much kills them straight away, but most professional kitchens have the crustaceans crawling about so they get used to a warmer temp making the boiling water less effective.
I don’t see how the study is supposed to provide evidence for crustacean pain. Pain has a purpose: it guides the animal away from harmful stimuli. The study shows that *something* plays that role in crabs, but does nothing whatsoever to show that it is a feeling that plays that role. Lots of behavioural guidance, in mammals including humans, is done by systems that are unconscious. It wouldn’t be surprising if unconscious systems played this role in crabs.
Don’t most sea creatures have the ability to sense electrical currents underwater to detect other creatures?
Maybe the crustacean thought there was too much activity in the shocked hideaway. Like having neighbours that play their music too loud, which would explain how it took some of the crustaceans three separate tries to pick the other hole.
In my opinion, all animals feel pain as it is necessary for survival.
I’ve always been utterly baffled by the popular opinion that no animals feel pain until proven otherwise. How arrogant we are to assume we’re so different to other animals on the planet.
I’m no vegetarian by a long way and I’m all for eating any animal for food; Just last night I was eating sushi, scallop, lobster, swordfish, prawns, beef and chicken at a Japanese restaurant. However, I cannot stand to see animals being cooked or eaten alive. It’s surely one of the cruellest and most painful deaths and completely avoidable.
Can’t we just save money by stopping this pointless research and just assume all animals feel pain? Pain is such a hard thing to measure and quantify that no amount research will be ever be conclusive, at least in the near future.
I’m sure I’d look for somewhere else to live if I kept getting taken out of my preferred dark space…
This experiment seems flawed. Crabs that chose the electric hole were taken out and “given time to reflect” before being put back in up to three times until they picked the right hole. This seems more of a learned pavlovian response rather than actually testing if they experience pain.
The crabs that chose the “correct hole” should have had the same treatment of being removed and replaced. Be interesting if they changed where they were going after a few times.