Of Lobsters & Plants

Thanks to a friend’s journal entry that I read back in the mid-1980s, I pretty much gave up lobster. He wrote about the “screams” emitting from the boiling pots and I have been traumatized ever since. These days, I can order lobster from a menu, but I could never prepare it myself, and every time I walk by the lobster tank at the supermarket I feel so badly for them. It doesn’t help that their claws are rubber banded shut, either. Well, all that has changed as of Thursday morning when I read that lobsters don’t feel pain.

“According to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), when considering the concept of pain, it's the "subjective, emotional response that's considered important" and not the "activation of pain sensors in the body."
"Only animals that can experience emotions such as fear, anxiety, distress, and terror can feel what we think of as pain."

This article from ABC News seems to back up these findings. When asked whether lobsters feel pain after being placed in boiling water, Tony Yaksh, a professor of anesthesiology, responded that because they lack the emotional component, lobsters feel something different than pain as we know it. Additionally, an independent study funded by the Norwegian government found that the nervous systems of lobsters are too simple to process pain.”

All right, fine, but it’s that “something different” that now has me worrying. Maybe it's as bad as, or worse than what we feel. Probably not. Still, I feel a little silly for this relative sense of relief and lack of guilt that I’m experiencing. This study also confirms a theory of mine. Like most tree-huggers of the 1960s and 70s, I read The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and The Findhorn Garden by the Findhorn Community, and for years I felt guilty every time I had to prune back one of my houseplants.

Later, I reasoned that pain is an alarm intended to alert a life form that something is wrong and that it needs to get as far away from the source of the pain as possible, whether that be an act of violence, an illness, or something self-inflicted. If plants felt pain, then I think that long ago when they were being chomped on by dinosaurs they would have evolved some mode of mobility. That would have been more difficult than simply losing the ability to feel the pain, however. But I’m reiterating if they ever felt pain to begin with. I don’t think they ever did.

Wow. The crap I’ve carried around for the past 20 years…