The Guardian 8 Nov 07: Blow for fans of boiled lobster: crustaceans feel pain, study says

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Blow for fans of boiled lobster: crustaceans feel pain, study says

*

* Ian Sample

* The Guardian Thursday November 8 2007

Sensitive chefs, avert your eyes now. An investigation into the most

contentious of kitchen dilemmas has reached its unpalatable

conclusion: lobsters do feel pain.

 

The question of crustaceans' ability to experience pain has become an

unlikely obsession for some scientists. Over the past few decades,

the question has been batted back and forth as fresh evidence comes

to light. Two years ago, Norwegian researchers declared the answer

was a firm no, claiming the animals' nervous systems were not complex

enough.

 

The latest salvo, published in New Scientist today, comes from Robert

Elwood, an expert in animal behaviour at Queen's University, Belfast.

With help from colleagues, he set about finding an answer by daubing

acetic acid on to the antennae of 144 prawns.

 

Immediately, the creatures began grooming and rubbing the affected

antenna, while leaving untouched ones alone, a response Prof Elwood

says is " consistent with an interpretation of pain experience " . The

same pain sensitivity is likely to be shared by lobsters, crabs and

other crustaceans, the researchers believe.

 

Prof Elwood says that sensing pain is crucial even for the most lowly

of animals because it allows them to change their behaviour after

damaging experiences and so increase their chances of survival.

The claim will add weight to campaigns by animal rights organisations

which protest against lobsters being boiled alive.

 

But conscientious eaters need not, necessarily, abandon lobster.

Other scientists believe the debate is far from over. Many think only

vertebrates have advanced enough nervous systems to feel pain, and

suspect that the prawns' reaction to having acid daubed on their

antennae was an attempt to clean them.

 

" Shrimps do not have a recognisable brain, " said Lynne Sneddon, a

Liverpool University researcher who has studied pain in fish. " You

could argue the shrimp is simply trying to clean the antenna rather

than showing a pain response. "

 

Richard Chapman, from the University of Utah's pain research centre

in Salt Lake City, stressed that most animals possessed receptors

which responded to irritants. " Even a single-cell organism can detect

a threatening chemical gradient and retreat from it, " he said. " But

this is not sensing pain. "

 

Prof Elwood insists such arguments are flawed. " Using the same

analogy, one could argue crabs do not have vision because they lack

the visual centres of humans, " he said. He urged further work looking

at whether crustaceans have the neurological architecture to feel

pain.

 

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