In the topsy-turvy world of European social think, Down syndrome is “disappearing” by abortion, flooding your country with hordes of Islamic migrants is compassion, and the boiling of live crustaceans is more horrific than the killing of unborn babies.
The latest country to get in on this race to insanity is Switzerland, which just followed New Zealand in the quest to protect lobsters from feeling pain. The new law requires that the bottom feeder be transported in salt water and be dead before boiling.
The argument that lobsters feel pain is not exactly a clear science, unlike fetal pain or the undisputed fact that babies are human at the moment of conception. Movements in certain countries to ban the practice of boiling lobsters alive has even left some scientists scratching their heads since lobsters have no brains and therefore have no ability to process pain.
“They can sense their environment,” said Bob Bayer, executive director of the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute, “but they probably don’t have the ability to process pain.”
One study that proponents of lobster pain typically cite is from the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2013, revealing that crabs will avoid electric shocks if tested. Bob Elwood, one of the study’s authors, said the study showed conclusively that crustaceans feel pain.
“I don’t know what goes on in a crab’s mind,” Elwood told BBC. “But what I can say is the whole behaviour goes beyond a straightforward reflex response and it fits all the criteria of pain.”
Except crabs don’t have minds, so nothing goes on in them. Marine biologist Jeff Shields, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, said the crabs’ responses could just have been avoidance to stimuli rather than pain. “That’s the problem,” he said, “there’s no way to tell.”
An explainer from the Lobster Institute says that the delicacy is really no different than a grasshopper. “Neither insects nor lobsters have brains,” says the institute. “For an organism to perceive pain, it must have a complex nervous system. A Neurophysiologists tell us that lobsters, like insects, do not process pain.”
LifeNews profiled more insane protective measures Switzerland has implemented for other species while continuing to kill the unborn:
Switzerland has amended its constitution to recognize the individual dignity of plants. Not ecosystems. Individual plant dignity.
One canton in Switzerland assigns a lawyer to represent animals. One such lawyer sued a fisherman on behalf of a client that became dinner, for taking to long to reel in the fish.
A GMO researcher, seeking to find a way to prevent fungus from spoiling wheat, could only obtain government financing when he asserted that the research would be beneficial for the wheat.
The country has outlawed flushing a living goldfish down the toilet.
In addition to abortion, Switzerland allows for something called “suicide tourism,” where people visit to get an assisted suicide. The Swiss Supreme Court also declared assisted suicide for the mentally ill a constitutional right.