Boiling lobsters while they are alive and conscious will be banned as part of a government strategy to improve animal welfare in England.
Government ministers say that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method” for crustaceans and alternative guidance will be published.
The practice is already illegal in Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand. Animal welfare charities say that stunning lobsters with an electric gun or chilling them in cold air or ice before boiling them is more humane.
Lobsters eat each other.
What’s more cruel?
Boiled for 35-45 seconds before death?
Or
Being crushed and dismembered bit by bit, being gnawed on, for many minutes, and possibly even being left in parts, to suffer on for longer yet, after the other lobster had its fill?
When I eat prawns, I often think of this, often putting it context how I’m not doing anything they don’t do to each other, simply meaning they know how tasty they are, and eat each other… but seeing this, makes me realise how much less cruel what I’m doing to them is, than they do to each other.
I’m open to even more humane ways to dispatch them, of course, not resting on any “lesser evil” fallacy, but also, lets not remove this context entirely.
Also, while we’re talking context…
The government in the UK, last decade, committed assault and fraud, dereliction of duty of care, torturing and starving and denying medication, transport, and nearly every human right, to the disabled poor, propagandising against them to drum up hate with more fraud, to cull over 130,000 people in a very slow cruel way. So it’s a little rich to think these tories (no matter if blue, yellow, or red), now “care”. Those who were Killing people over durations often into the months and years of suffering, are now concerned for lobsters suffering for seconds?
Which one is natural? A lobster fighting another lobster in its natural environment, or a human stuffing them into a pot of boiling water?
Here, let’s meet up and we can test both on you to see which you think is more cruel.
Then you wrap it up with a fat paragraph of whataboutism. You’re dwindeling.
Edit: to the mods removing my comments, they apply to you as well.
Interesting attempt to call out a whataboutism (I’ll check on that in a moment), after making your own appeal-to-nature fallacy, wrapped in red-herring fallacy.
And, strikingly:
Here, let’s meet up and we can test both on you to see which you think is more cruel.
Besides that being a vile proposal, it seems a thought experiment you’ve not thought through.
Okay, lets see where I made a whataboutism…
After some careful consideration… nope. Not a whataboutism fallacy. Was not deflecting. Was showing context to draw even more attention to the matter. Was not an attempt to make one thing seem okay by some other equivalent or worse thing. Was drawing the point of the implausibility that the government are caring for lobsters, given their past actions [Though, can steelman that argument better, if even only just on the face value of “the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing” aspect of big clumsy government, or even (I find incredulous) that this is under a New Labour government, not a Conservative or Conservative&LibDem coalition government]. And I certainly was not at any point trying to make it sound like it’s okay to boil lobsters alive. Sorry for whatever lack of clarity about that which I may have caused by neglectful omission of explicitly stating my position on that. … I do not think it’s right to boil lobsters alive, especially when there are other less cruel means to dispatch them. Though, I do remain open to more scientific scrutiny and reasoning on the matter, and can entertain other possibilities (like, maybe their nerve endings shut off from boiling and they dont actually suffer? And perhaps the knife through the head leaves them in an effective eternal state of suffering felt all over? Or other unknowns.).
If you're as into pastes of fairly lengthy discussions with an LLM to analyse fallacies in interactions as I am, click here
Oh bugger… It’s too lengthy to paste to lemmy. I forgot, this is not diaspora. okies, pasting to a file on my kimsufi… http://ks392457.kimsufi.com/stuff/llmpaste20251224fallacyanalysis it’s only about a thousand lines long. I will add though… despite my efforts to counter the llm sycophancy corruption effect, it’s probably still leaning too lenient and biased.
I’ll break it down for you, since reading comprehension is difficult.
Whatbaoutism does not mean (X is worse, therefore Y is fine)
Whataboutism is also anything that shifts the context of the narrative. As you did by switching it from lobsters to disabled people in the UK. One has nothing to do with the other. You are attempting whataboutism wrapped in a hypocrisy tortilla.
Thank you for also noting that the proposal was vile, so you can agree its a vile act to boil lobsters alive as you finally noted in the end of your response, yes?
Its also nice to see you claim that appeal to nature fallacy, but it is clear you again have no reading comprehension or you would have landed in the ballpark of what I did is called descriptive contrast.
You entirelt deflected because nothing you added was context related to the topic.
You d-e-f-l-e-c-t-e-d
Humans have moral agency. Lobsters have not been proven or shown to have that, therefore we can not judge or dictate what or how a lobster does anything. We can, however, demand ethical scrutiny regardless of their own behavior.
Wow.
Several strawman arguments, misrepresenting whataboutism (sounded more like a definition or red herring or moved goal post) and another fallacious accusation of whataboutism, appeal to definition, begging the question, false dichotomy, non-sequitur and self-contradiction, red herring, ad-hominems and deflection (ironically even in your hypocritical emphatic repetition of accusation of deflection (which was already refuted, and nothing done to tackle the refutation, as with other parts in this exchange)), appeal to ignorance, vague jargon, projection, dismissiveness, evasiveness, sophistry… and was that even another (at least) couple appeal to nature fallacies too, one of which wrapped in one of the strawman arguments, offering a redundant subtly moved-goal post?
That’s a hefty brandolini’s-law workload to expand upon each fallacy (and malady) to offer counter-explanations and refutations to. So much so… I don’t think we’re going to make much progress here. Bowing out.
That was a lot of word salad with no citations. Good on you for maintaining how you move the goal posts. Its a certain level of ignorance to maintain that lifestyle. Good on you for commitment.
It frightens me that we can’t 100% agree that boiling a living thing that feels pain, is bad.
Humans are the worst.
Most killing involves pain, all meat requires killing.
all plant eating is killing too
Correct. Scientists have done studies on vibrations from plants and they have a reaction to being cut and pulled that could be equated to a “pain” response.
Let’s suppose that you actually genuinely care about reducing the amount of plant suffering in the world. If this is the case, surely you would be vegan, because 3/4 of our total agricultural land is used to grow plants to support animal agriculture. (Since grass feels pain just like soybeans do, this includes pasture land.) So far fewer plants would be killed if everyone was vegan.
Of course, you don’t actually live your life in a manner consistent with believing plants feel pain. I don’t think anyone would think twice about swerving into some flowers to avoid a dog in the street for fear of causing suffering to the flowers.
Do you have any idea how many animals and bugs suffer at the hands of your monocultures in to produce soybeans and tofu? They destroy the habitat, poison the ground and the water, and make it impossible for most things to live on vast tracks of land. They interrupt migration patterns of larger animals.
You guys must all be small scale organic farmers like me! Surely if you cared about all life so much, you would be doing more of your personal space to accommodate? Shall we analyze your diet Friend? Let us discuss what you were eating and how you are acquiring it.
Cmon let’s be real, again this is a very simple trophic levels thing. If you truly care about the suffering of all the field mice and bugs and whatever being killed in soybean monocultures, and their other various environmental harms, then surely you would be vegan, because 75% of all soybeans grown globally are used as animal feed. (Source)
I truly care about the health of the planet and our many diverse eco-systems. I truly believe in the mountain of science on the subject. I truly believe in the laws of nature. The cycle of life and death that forms the eco-system. I think your vegan farming is just as bad as the meat farmers. Vast tracks of land poisoned to produce soy protein, fuel corn, palm oil and what ever else you need to create such an unnatural diet. I truly believe that eating food you produce and that is local to you is the real ethical choice. A healthy cow farm benefits the neighboring veggie farm, macro fauna increase biodiversity and manage plants. There’s a lot going on in the natural world, I’d rather not see it all get replaced by ignorance, self righteousness and Soylent.
75% of the weight of the crop is fed to animals, but 69% of the crop weight would be industrial waste if it wasn’t fed to animals. that’s a conservation of resources
Not true.
As at least one commenter said already, meat can be extracted without killing.
And further, you can wait for something to die of natural causes, and then you get the meat.
And now, arguably, “meat” can be made in a lab. Perhaps suppressed secret tech already has star-trek style replicators.
At least 3 distinct ways of meat without killing.
At a stretch… seeds and mushrooms can be considered/called “meat”.
Probably more ways yet I’ve not thought of.
