NYC Letter: No Brain. No Pain

In Samuel Beckett's book of shorties, More Pricks Than Kicks, the first story, Dante and the Lobster, ends thus:

...in the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman’s cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath.

Belaqua looked at the old parchment of her face, grey in the dim kitchen.

"You make a fuss", she said angrily,"and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner".

She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live. Well, thought Belaqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all.

It is not.

[Emphasis added.]

Ah, perhaps not quick, but Mr. Shuah would be comforted to know it is painless.

A new study out of Norway concludes that it's unlikely lobsters feel pain, stirring up a long-simmering debate over whether Maine's most valuable seafood suffers when it's being cooked.

The study, which was funded by the Norwegian government and written by a scientist at the University of Oslo, suggests that lobsters and other invertebrates probably don't suffer even if lobsters do tend to thrash in boiling water.

"Lobsters and crabs have some capacity of learning, but it is unlikely that they can feel pain," the study concluded.

The 39-page report was aimed at determining if invertebrates should be subject to animal welfare legislation as Norway revises its animal welfare law. The report looked at invertebrate groups such as insects, crustaceans, worms and mollusks and summarized the scientific literature dealing with feelings and pain among those creatures without backbones.

It concluded that most invertebrates — including lobsters, crabs, worms, snails, slugs and clams — probably don't have the capacity to feel pain.

But not everyone is convinced:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA], an animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Va., has made lobster pain part of its Fish Empathy Project, putting out stickers and pamphlets with slogans like, "Being Boiled Hurts. Let Lobsters Live."

Are lobsters, gentle reader, different than you or us? If someone puts this question to you, it signals insurmountable problems ahead in the discussion of husbandry. The answer -- if not self-manifest about your person -- is yes. Yes, you and we are different from the lobster. And it is a more telling difference than the obvious one of our not being as tasty boiled alive and plunged into lemon butter as the more deliciously gifted decapod.

...Mike Loughlin, who studied the boiling of lobsters when he was a University of Maine graduate student, said lobsters simply lack the brain capacity to feel pain.

"It's a semantic thing: No brain, no pain," said Loughlin.

[All emphases added.]

Now this is a comforting thought for us all.

To think, as our friends on the Left walk into walls, fight for their every breath, shoot themselves in both left feet, go off their meds and do violence to themselves, choke on their own vomit, and responsibly euthanized themselves -- to think, in all this, no pain.

Whether an all-merciful God or Nature's artful design has palliated the sting of the Left's ferocious emotions and self-afflictions, we cannot answer to everyone's satisfaction. But the next time you're out for a stroll in the sun and you come upon some twitching Lefty in the process of spending himself in spastic anger or wild rage or cataracts of scalding tears, well, dear reader, pass on. Even in such straitened circumstances, the Lefty enjoys the analgesic beatitude of low brain mass. And science certifies to no meaningful pain.

No brain. No pain.

Why, the lobster medallions atop your creamed pappardelle are more pitiable.