42. Crustaceans and snails as food and new challenges for ensuring ethical behavior toward invertebrates
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To date, invertebrates are less valued and understood than vertebrates and their welfare is comparatively overlooked. This is often justified by assumptions that invertebrates have less capacity to experience pain and suffering and completely lack the capacity for higher order cognitive functions. However, recent research suggests that there are previously unknown similarities between invertebrates and vertebrates, including their ability to suffer and some comparable cognitive abilities. Hence, current practices that do not take into consideration that invertebrates may experience something like pain and stress may cause significant suffering. These considerations apply to decapod crustaceans as well as to snails, which are animals that, as with other invertebrates, in most countries are not included in animal use protection legislation. That takes on great significance when they are used as food. Indeed, these animals are one of the few creatures that may be slaughtered at home; this means that they are often boiled alive, as that is the usual way to kill and cook them. Furthermore, they are confined in packaging in order to be distributed to consumers through importers/wholesalers and distributors/retailers. Sometimes they are kept in storage facilities for several days, without being fed and, in the case of crustaceans, out of water. These methods are not ‘humane’ in themselves. In the recent past, the Swiss government has ordered that lobsters have to be stunned before they are killed and ‘live crustaceans, including the lobster, may no longer be transported on ice or in ice water’. This new regulation preventing cruelty to crustaceans has come at the same time as some Italian case-law follows that prohibits lobsters from being kept on ice in restaurant kitchens or fish markets. Is the future of animal rights bending in the direction of more empathy towards more creatures? In addition to these legal considerations, there are profound ethical implications of aspects of our treatment of invertebrates. After a brief discussion of the problem of evaluating pain and suffering in invertebrates, the Author reflects on the difficult questions for the application of legal and ethical principles of animal welfare to decapod crustaceans and snails.