Crustacean relations

At first glance, you might have thought that little was happening in Committee Room 16. Covid restrictions at the Palace of Westminster meant only a handful of people were there to discuss the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill yesterday afternoon. But for the many watching online, the subject could not have been more incendiaryControversial. It literally means: designed to start fires.. What hung in the balance was the welfare of millions of creatures.

Sentience, according to the bill, means "the capability of an animal to perceive or feel things". If an animal feels pain, the thinking goes, then humans have a duty to spare it suffering.

Sentient animals are protected by EU law. Since Brexit, however, that law no longer applies in Britain. So a new one has been proposed - and though it will almost certainly be passed, its wording has prompted a fierce debate.

As it stands, vertebratesAnimals which have backbones. - including fish - are recognised as feeling pain. But invertebrates, such as octopuses and shellfish, are not. So it would be fine to cook a lobster in the traditional way - by putting it while still alive into a pot of boiling water.

Some campaigners consider this barbaric. They include the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation (CAWF), whose patrons include the prime minister's wife Carrie Johnson.

A recent CAWF report found that Britain's fishing fleet lands over 420 million cephalopodsCreatures with distinct heads and tentacles. The term comes from two Greek words meaning head and feet. and crustaceansCreatures with segmented bodies and limbs and armour-like exoskeletons. They include lobsters, crabs and prawns. each year. This amounts to 73,600 tonnes of crustaceans and 12,100 tonnes of cephalopods.

The report argues that these creatures have been denied protection because their brains are so different from ours. An octopus's brain, for instance, is not confined to its head, but spread throughout its body. According to CAWF's founder, Lorraine Platt, "All but a very small minority of scientists agree these are sentient animals capable of pain and suffering."

She points to the Netflix film My Octopus TeacherThe film won the 2021 Oscar for best documentary., which won the Best Documentary award at this year's Oscars.

It records the touching relationship between a diver and a female octopus, which has extraordinarily clever ways of hiding from its predatorsIts tactics included wrapping shells around itself at lightning speed to make itself invisible.. It also seems to feel pain when injured by a shark - and to feel friendship.  

The film has been hugely popular, and many people have stopped eating octopus and squid as a result.

But one scientist, Nicholas Humphrey, maintains that what sentience actually means is feeling pleasure or pain as humans do. That involves being conscious of your own existence - and only warm-blooded mammals and birds have evolved far enough for that.

Other creatures, he insists in a Daily Mail article, only register pain in the way that a car's dashboard registers an engine fault: "Arguably, when it comes to conscious feelings, boiling the lobster is no more offensive than boiling an alarm clock."

Humphrey believes that denying this can only lead to endless court casesHumphrey makes a comparison with medieval cases in which animals were tried for wrongdoing like humans.: "Until we can agree on which animals are sentient to start with... those with the most to gain from the new law will be the lawyers."

Are we creating a pointless legal minefield?

Some say, yes. To be effective, laws have to be based on facts, not speculation. The only way we could possibly establish whether animals experience the world as we do would be if they were able to talk - which of course they cannot. We can at least tell whether a dog is suffering pain or distress because of the noise it makes, but a lobster will always be a mystery to us.

Others argue that we are discovering more about animals every day. My Octopus Teacher was a revelation because it showed a real bond between the octopus and the diver: that being the case, we should treat cephalopods with the same respect as cats or dogs. Sine there is every chance that we will make equally extraordinary discoveries about crustaceans, their rights have to be worth fighting for.