The other day I heard this chef talking on the radio about dropping lobsters into boiling water. The question was whether this or any other method of cooking live lobster was humane. Specifically he was focusing on the question of whether the lobster feels pain. The chef’s preferred method was to first put the lobster in the freezer until it stops moving and then drop it into boiling water.
Of course there is no way to know whether the lobster feels pain from being boiled alive but we can ask whether there is any theoretical reason it would feel pain. In creatures that feel it, pain is a selected response to a condition in the environment that is to be avoided. Notice an implication of this: being a (life-)threatening is a necessary but not sufficient condition for some environmental feature to induce the response of pain.
Apparently humans do not feel pain, or anything at all, when exposed to life-threatening carbon monoxide. Presumably that is because relative to the span of time it takes to evolve a protective painful response, carbon monoxide has not been a relevant threat for very long. No response has been selected for yet.
Does a lobster ever encounter hot water in its natural environment? Is there any channel through which natural selection would have given lobsters a painful response to being boiled? What about being frozen?
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January 22, 2013 at 10:58 pm
W. K. Winecoff
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster
DFW put quite a lot of thought into this.
January 22, 2013 at 11:17 pm
afinetheorem
Beyond the amazing DFW article on this point, if you grew up in New England, you know the proper way to keep the lobster in the pot: put him on the floor and let him run around for a few minutes until he is tuckered out, then pick him up and drop him in the boiling water. The lobster will be too tired to crawl out.
January 23, 2013 at 10:02 am
xan
Lobsters apparently react to hot water, unlike our nonreaction to carbon monoxide. Because they can detect it, and because it is destroying their flesh, I would say there’s a good bet they feel pain in *some* sense. But “pain” has a very different meaning in an animal with no centralized nervous system. The signal is not being relayed to some brain that contemplates the need to focus on a problem and escape it. There is probably nothing analogous to our “awareness” that we are in pain, and maybe that’s where suffering really enters the picture.
DFW is a great writer but he rests his argument on the anthropomorphized *appearance* of pain, without investigating further into the science.
further reading:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/06/connecticut-style-hot-butter-lobster-rolls-reconsidering-the-lobster-david-foster-wallace.html
(umm…yes, together with a recipe for lobster rolls)
January 23, 2013 at 10:08 am
xan
As for freezing, that’s a harder question. It’s much more plausible to me that freezing a lobster is analogous to our suffocation on carbon monoxide. But it is also quite possible that freezing is similar to boiling but for a much longer time, which would mean more suffering.
Perhaps lobsters have an aversion to cold that keeps them in the optimal water temperature. “Extreme discomfort” is probably more applicable than “pain” here, like our reaction to being cold.
January 24, 2013 at 6:24 am
twicker
Also possible that being put in an extremely cold environment triggers a hibernation-type response in a lobster, as with other cold-blooded creatures (recall that the lobster never “freezes;” it’s just in an environment where, if it stayed, it would *eventually* freeze). Then, it could be that coming out of that state is a slower process than is being boiled alive.
January 23, 2013 at 11:52 am
Enrique
I wonder what Wittgenstein would say?
January 23, 2013 at 7:44 pm
jonm
Does a human ever encounter hot water in its natural environment? Is there any channel through which natural selection would have given humans a painful response to being boiled?
January 23, 2013 at 11:09 pm
jeff
Heat in general sure. But you made your point. If possible it is enough for organisms to detect and react to danger at a lower level. If tissue damage is painful then boiling water will be painful even if lobsters have never been boiled.
January 23, 2013 at 9:03 pm
dan1983@yahoo.com
Have humans ever encountered cars in their natural environments? If not, can we safely conclude that being run over by a car doesn’t cause any pain in humans? It could be that boiling water enacts the very same mechanism that is used to detect other threatening situations, just like when humans are run over by cars.
Or, to put it differently, if we presented a lobster with a choice between a pot of boiling water and another one with water at room temperature, which one do you think it would enter? (Unlike humans who can’t detect carbon monoxide and would be indifferent between rooms with and without it, lobsters seem to detect boiling water quite well).
January 25, 2013 at 1:01 pm
bellisaurius
some species of lobsters live near hydrothermal vents: http://www.deepseaphotography.com/data.php?id=29455