As if we Didn’t Already Know the Answer: New Study Provides the Lobsters and Crustaceans Feel Pain

It’s insane that some still deny that crustaceans feel pain. Common sense. Still though, this study puts one more nail in the coffin to the alternate claim.

Article:

Blow for fans of boiled lobster: crustaceans feel pain, study says
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/nov/
08/animalrights.sciencenews

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.