Do Lobsters Feel Pain?
As I noted in the first post of this series, I have become particularly interested in social attitudes about lobsters because of a local campaign to have the “Lobster Zone” game removed from local bars. I learned that people often have negative emotional reactions to lobsters that in turn lead them to make uneducated and often negative assumptions about them (see part 2 of this series). I have experienced this first-hand when participating in my local campaign against the Lobster Zone. On a number of occasions, protesters chanted a familiar grassroots verse: “You must understand, their blood is on your hands.” The response to this by the Lobster Zone supporters was, almost every time, “Lobsters don’t have blood.”
Part 3 of 3
Other parts in this blog series: Part 1: About the Lobster Part 2: Attitudes Toward Lobsters |
As I noted in the first post of this series, I have become particularly interested in social attitudes about lobsters because of a local campaign to have the “Lobster Zone” game removed from local bars. I learned that people often have negative emotional reactions to lobsters that in turn lead them to make uneducated and often negative assumptions about them (see part 2 of this series). I have experienced this first-hand when participating in my local campaign against the Lobster Zone. On a number of occasions, protesters chanted a familiar grassroots verse: “You must understand, their blood is on your hands.” The response to this by the Lobster Zone supporters was, almost every time, “Lobsters don’t have blood.”
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Clearly, the sense of metaphor had been lost. But the game’s supporters were pointing out something important that allowed for the game to be created in the first place—lobsters appear to be quite different from humans. These differences can make it difficult for some people to relate to lobsters and easy to assume that they are not sentient creatures deserving of consideration, leaving us with the question, do lobsters feel pain?
Before I answer that question I want to alert you that some of the research I present in this blog post is based on experimentation on animals. Neither I as an individual, nor HRC as an organization, condone or endorse any animal research. We are using this research with the hope that these findings can assist advocates in their work to help animals. So, back to our cliffhanger…
The answer is yes… probably.
There is still some disagreement among scientists, though the most recent research suggests that there is reason to expect that lobsters do feel pain. For those that conclude lobsters may not feel pain, the main issue is that the way that humans process pain is not possible in lobsters. Humans have a central nervous system, which sends messages of pain to the brain. The biology of lobsters looks much different, as the folks at the Atlantic Veterinary College (AVC) Lobster Science Center explain:
“Lobsters have a series of 15 nervous ganglia that span the length of the lobster, on the ventral side or belly side, with nerves projecting from each of these ganglia. The first ganglion is the closest thing to a brain… Lobsters don’t have a cerebral cortex, which is where pain is processed in humans or dogs and cats.”
This leads them to conclude that, “If [lobsters] do feel pain, it is most definitely in a different way than humans do…[they] probably don’t have the capacity to feel pain.” This explanation is premised on the idea that having different biological systems for processing stimuli leads to an inability to have equivalent experiences with certain stimuli.
Scientists who come to the opposite conclusion, that lobsters do feel pain, look not at the differences in biology, but in the similarity, of responses to negative stimuli. According to Broom, indicators of sentience in animals are that, when exposed to painful stimuli, they can learn, learn a lot, learn quickly, and make few errors after learning. Studies show that this is the case. Advocates for Animals conducted a review of literature examining cephalopods’ and decapod crustaceans’ (lobsters are included here) ability to feel pain. They concluded:
“[T]he behaviour of decapod crustaceans shows that they can recognise and remember painful or threatening objects or situations and try to avoid them. The animals also have the ability to learn and to make discriminations. They show some understanding and memory both of places and of other individuals, for example by forming social hierarchies when a number of animals are kept confined together.”
Citing three separate studies that examined decapods crustaceans, Donald Broom of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine also concludes that “[they] show behavioural, anatomical and physiological indications of having a sophisticated pain system.”
In summary, you can find a study to validate whatever perspective you have on this matter, but most research cautions that lobsters probably do feel pain. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be on the safe side, and try not to hurt any of the decapod crustaceans I meet.
[P.S. Lobsters DO have blood! According to AVC: “[Lobsters] do have blood; it’s called hemolymph as it is more or less composed of blood and lymph together. Just like human blood, lobster hemolymph transports blood cells as well as oxygen and other gases, nutrients, wastes, hormones and other molecules involved in the internal defense. Unlike human blood, lobster blood varies from white to grey to pink in color.”]