Attitudes Toward Lobsters
Invertebrates constitute over 90% of all animal species on the planet, and we come into contacts with invertebrates on a daily basis. Even so, few people have sought to study social attitudes toward invertebrates. There are only two comprehensive studies that examine attitudes toward animals such as lobsters. Janis Wiley Driscoll of the University of Colorado and Stephen R. Kellert of Yale University looked in depth at the value of invertebrates to human society. Both researchers found that people have a generally negative view of lobsters.
Part 2 of 3
Other parts in this blog series: Part 1: About the Lobster Part 3: Do Lobsters Feel Pain? |
Invertebrates constitute over 90% of all animal species on the planet, and we come into contacts with invertebrates on a daily basis. Even so, few people have sought to study social attitudes toward invertebrates. There are only two comprehensive studies that examine attitudes toward animals such as lobsters. Janis Wiley Driscoll of the University of Colorado assessed peoples’ attitudes toward different species of animals and Stephen R. Kellert of Yale University looked in depth at the value of invertebrates to human society. Both researchers found that people have a generally negative view of lobsters.
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Driscoll had respondents rate 33 different species of animals on six dimensions: usefulness, intelligence, responsiveness, loveableness, safety, and importance. Lobsters were rated similar to turkeys, chickens, trout, ladybugs, garter snakes, and earthworms. These animals seem different in many ways, but Driscoll attributes their similar ratings to the fact that they are all useful to humans:
“[This group] included animals which are used by humans for food or which we have been taught are useful to humans (e.g., eats bugs, improves the soil). These animals were given high ratings on usefulness, importance, and safety, but were seen as stupid and unloveable. Lobsters were rated as somewhat more dangerous that the rest of the group and ladybugs as more loveable.”
Driscoll turns to the research of Michael W. Fox to explain her findings. According to Fox, the public’s attitudes toward animals is based on the way the species has historically been used by human society, its utility to humans, and the way people emotionally react to that species. Lobsters have a history of high utility and low appreciation in U.S. society. In his essay, “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace explains that lobsters were once plentiful and could cheaply feed people. As such, into the 1800s, they were seen as low-class food and regarded as low on the food chain. Today, however, the role of the lobster has changed. They are still disregarded singularly as a food animal, but they have moved social classes. Today, lobster is expensive and is an item of culinary conspicuous consumption.
Lobsters’ social role may be tied to the fact that they engender negative emotional reactions. According to Kellert, “the general public… were found to view most invertebrates with aversion, anxiety, fear, avoidance, and ignorance.” He turns to past research to explain this negative reaction and finds a few plausible explanations. One explanation is that it is an evolutionarily driven fear to avoid dangerous invertebrates, such as poisonous spiders. Other evolutionary explanations include the association of invertebrates to disease and crop depletion.
This aversion appears to be translated into beliefs about these animals’ capacities for intelligent thought and suffering. The majority of respondents in Kellert’s study viewed invertebrates as incapable of pain and without a rational consciousness; those in Driscoll’s study rated lobsters very low in terms of intelligence and responsiveness. Are these educated beliefs, or merely perceptions that accommodate the way that lobsters and other invertebrates are treated in human society? In the following post, the last of this series, I will explore the biological research about lobsters’ capacity to feel pain.