"Crabs Feel Pain"

[Elton]

I see another threat looming.....

 

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20090327/tuk-c...in-6323e80.html

[Steve Coppolo]

I see another threat looming.....

 

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20090327/tuk-c...in-6323e80.html

 

That's it. Sig's going to have to sell his boat now.

 

And how cruel are those scientists, torturing crabs? I thought children pulling the wings off flies was bad enough.

[Steve Walker]

The experiment doesn't prove anything of the sort! It proves that hermit crabs will move out of shells that zap them with electricity, and that they learn to discard a shell which has been repeatedly zapping them. Not really surprising for an animal evolved to find and exploit suitable empty shells (and more to the point, to reject unsuitable ones).

[Arf]

All living creatures feel pain.. The perception of pain and the response to this stimulus is a basic necessity to survival and evolution of all things.

 

Do 'scientists' not have better things to do these days, than construct weak indicators that what is obviously evident could be marginally plausible? What a waste of time and energy. The world has gone mad.

[Norrie]

I see another threat looming.....

 

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20090327/tuk-c...in-6323e80.html

 

 

:), OK Elton...you win, THIS time.. :rolleyes:

 

http://www.qub.ac.uk/home/TheUniversity/Ge...,141245,en.html

 

 

It seems "they" are going to look at the way the crustaeceans are handled in the food industry...an RSPCC perhaps... :D

 

TBH, its about time they undertook some serious research..they must have been bored, not having a meeting in some far off sunny country to attend....ALL IMHO of course..

[Steve Walker]

All living creatures feel pain.. The perception of pain and the response to this stimulus is a basic necessity to survival and evolution of all things.

 

It comes down to an argument of semantics over what "pain" is - which matters when it comes down to what you are going to do with the information. I would distance "pain" from simple stimulus/response. I don't believe that a coral polyp "feels pain" in the same way that a dog or a human does, but it will retreat if a tentacle is nipped. I don't think that a definition of pain which can't differentiate between the sentient and insentient animals is useful, because it leads to the conclusion that putting a worm on a hook is equivalent to impaling a dog.

[Dave B]

I should imagine that every live bait we use feels 'pain', but we choose to ignore it. Who'd be a ragworm eh!

Anyway, I doubt that crabs feel anywhere near the amount of pain the Murph is gonna feel tonight! Apparently he's thinking of fishing The Wall in a Force 6 and torrential rain!

[Elton]

There's at least two others joining me later, Dave. One of them is a contributor to your magazine - I promise to look after him

[Steve Coppolo]

It's going to be painful walking the two miles along the shingle back to the car, under the weight of all those cod I'm going to catch.

[Leon Roskilly]

All living creatures feel pain.. The perception of pain and the response to this stimulus is a basic necessity to survival and evolution of all things.

 

 

In the mammalian cortex is an area which when not developed or damaged renders a human incapable of feeling pain, often with unwlcome consequences (children who chew off their own fingers, patients who burn through their skin from a radiator).

 

That part of the brain is absent earlier than the reptilian brain.

 

Lobotomised patients report that they can feel pain, but have no emotional response. ie they feel it, but simply don't care about it!

 

Again pre-reptilians, if they did have some capacity to feel 'pain' wouldn't have the capacity to care.

 

Pain is useful to land dwelling creatures which encounter sharpness, can fall and trip etc.

 

Undersea creatures rarely experience circumstances where pain would provide useful warning (they don't trip over, sit on sharp objects, fall from height, encounter splitered wood etc), so probably had no need to evolve an ability to feel anything remotely like the pain that is familiar to us, in many different forms.