2y ago

New Zealand Officially Recognizes Lobsters, Octopuses, Crabs as Sentient Beings

bnnbreaking.com

New Zealand Officially Recognizes Lobsters, Octopuses, and Crabs as Sentient Beings

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

23 comments

Excuse me, but it recognizes all of us cephalopods as sentient beings, thank you very much.
Too bad this 'bnnbreaking.com' is literally the only source for this story.
- Ok I had to Google this because I've never seen anything on squid intelligence. Octopus and cuttlefish, yes. Looks like squid got more going on than I'd previously thought.
  I still need some convincing on decapods though.
  Also, do you like own Lemmy or something? You're EVERYWHERE.
  
  Well, it's not surprising he gets around. He can fly after all.
  
  lemmy is free software running on federated servers. no one owns lemmy.
- Yeah, HN flagged and removed the link.
- Is there a legal definition of sentience?
  
  Dunno about legal, but I'm pretty sure the scientific bar for sentience is pretty low. You basically just have to have senses (e g. hearing, sight, etc) and react to stimuli to be sentient.
New Zealander here. I've heard nothing of this and it's been a slow news week.
- Now that the bird of the century elections are over, I guess it's hard to get excited about anything else the rest of the year.
- Also a New Zealander, looks like the "news" site is confusing New Zealand and the UK?
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_(Sentience)_Act_2022
Doing this to any animal—regardless of sentience—is straight fucked up. Nothing says selfish like torturing an animal to death so it tastes better. Make it quick.
- I'm vegetarian, so I'm not defending this at all, but as I understand it, boiling kind of is the best way to kill a lobster quickly. A friend of mine had a roommate who thought otherwise and tried to decapitate one for dinner. I don't know their biology well, but there's something about lobsters' brains spanning the length of their body, so it wouldn't die. Just horribly suffering and bleeding everywhere with a knife through its body. Tossing it in boiling water should near instantly kill it. All the water inside their shell steams immediately.
  
  Unfortunately your roommate seems to have been using improper technique, this video shows how to properly do it.
  As far as I know this is considered much less painful than boiling.
- Consider the lobster
- I thought that was needed to avoid toxins or something.
  
  That's if you kill the lobsters hours before, generally nowadays it's considered more humane to kill it just before putting it into the pot.
Strange thumbnail. The actual title of the article says New Zealand too. Those wacky Pakistani journos!
BNN - a Fox News AI experiment /s
Not the Onion?
I mean, yeah. The bar for sentience is very low. Sapience is a lot higher of a bar.
\ People have shown that plants can be sentient after all (they can feel pain at least, IIRC). So it makes sense that almost any multicellular organism above a certain amount of cells would be sentient.
Okay. So, put them to sleep then boil them. I am not missing out on my water scorpion food.

23 comments