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Recently we had received an email that says something like: 'Click here for chance to win 40 lbs.of lobster!'

Now we looked up that company who mails around that advertisement and they state on their site that they wouldn't take responsibility for any ads they mail.

So they actually want to avoid people sending in complaints or protests.

We tried to send an email to the given address in the ad, but they don't accept any email.

Please send a protest to any company that offers or makes ads for killing lobsters.

We wrote:

Dear Sir or Madam, 

I am writing to you in regard to an advertisement distributed by your company which promotes a chance to win 40 pounds of lobster. I would like to ask you to cancel the ad for the following reasons:

According to University of Pennsylvania neurobiologist Tom Abrams, lobsters have "a full array of senses." And Dr. Jaren Horsley, an invertebrate zoologist at the National Zoo, has found that lobsters have a "sophisticated nervous system," which allows them to feel and suffer pain.

Lobsters are commonly boiled alive, though for some dishes living crabs or lobsters are cut up, and for lobster mousse, the flesh is scraped out of the live animal. Perhaps most people see shellfish as cold-blooded creatures that cannot feel pain. This cannot be taken for granted. Crabs and lobsters in particular have complex nervous systems and there is a body of scientific research which suggests that they do feel pain and distress. Oxford University zoologist Dr. John Baker, found that lobsters dropped into boiling water, showed "powerful struggling movements" for up to two minutes and he concluded that these were not reflex actions but indications of pain.

Lobsters carry their young for 9 months and have a long childhood and awkward adolescence. Lobsters use complicated signals to establish social relationships. Some of them are right handed, some are left handed. They have been observed walking hand in hand, the old leading the young.

I also request that you take responsibility for advertising that your company distributes. I'm not sure yet about all of the legal details of advertisement distribution responsibility on the internet, but I will look into that soon. Please don't tell me that you have no control of such an ad as the one mentioned above when your company, in fact, distributes it per e-mail.

Sincerely,

THANK YOU FOR TAKING ACTION!!!

(http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/class/596v/week11.txt - ressource is archived if not accesible):

In a recent article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (1998, Volume 5, 3) entitled "Consciousness: A Natural History", Maxine Sheets-Johnstone questions the correctness of these hierarchical conceptions and of the assumption that "unconsciousness historically preceded consciousness" in animals. She suggests that proprioception may be the first evolved form of consciousness. The evolution of proprioception, she proposes, parallels the evolution of animate forms, such that from the very beginning of the ability of organisms to move, there was a need for a kind of flexible responsivity to external stimuli. It is arbitrary, she argues, to call this responsivity behavioral or cognitive when referring to 'lower animals' and conscious when referring to humans or 'higher animals.' The fact that this is frequently done has much to do, she claims, with our brain-centered notions of consciousness that disregard more embodied sensory abilities. She notes that the first human sense to develop is proprioception (it develops prenatally with the early development of motor pathways), and it is through this sense that we initially come to learn to move our bodies and to feel ourselves. This is a sense that we share with many 'simple' creatures. Sheets-Johnstone provides a description of the proprioceptive abilities of invertebrates that makes the assumption that unconscious mechanisms explain the behaviors of these 'lower animals' look disturbingly ad hoc. In response to Dennett, who claims that in simple organisms "there is really nothing much to self-knowledge beyond the rudimentary biological wisdom enshrined in such maxims as 'When Hungry, Don't Eat Yourself!' and 'When there's a Pain, It's Yours!'" she questions the parsimony of explaining animal behaviors in terms of such mechanisms. I'll close with the following quotation in which she makes this point: "[W]e should ask what it means to say that a lobster will eat another's claws but that conveniently, as Dennett puts it, it finds eating one of its own claws unthinkable. Does it mean that there is actually a rule 'Don't eat your own claws!' wired into the lobster's neurological circuitry? But it is patently unparsimonious to think that there is such a rule and just as patently absurd to think that every creature comes prepared with an owner's manual, as it were, a rulebook replete with what Dennett calls 'maxims'. Such a maxim, for example would be only one of an indefinitely great number of maxims that a lobster (or, in analogous terms, any other 'simpler organism') could be said to carry around in the neural machinery that counts as its 'Headquarters'; 'Don't try to go on land!' 'Don't try to eat a squid!' 'Shovel in new sand grains after molting!' 'The large claw is for crushing!' 'The small claw is for seizing and tearing!' And so on. … What makes eating its own claws 'conveniently unthinkable' is clearly something other than a rule of conduct. 'Convenience' is not a matter of an opportune adaptation but of an astioundingly varied and intricately detailed biological faculty that allows a creature to know its own body and its own body in movement. … These kinetic cognitional abilities constitute a corporeal consciousness. … A moment's serious reflection … discloses a major reason why … sensitivity to movement is both basic and paramount: no matter what the particular world in which an animal lives, it is not an unchanging world. Hence, whatever the animal, its movement cannot be absolutely programmed such that, for example, at all times its particular speed and direction of movement, its every impulse and stirring, its every pause and stillness, run automatically on something akin to a lifetime tape" (Sheets-Johnstone, 1998, pp. 274-8). Offering mechanistic explanations for animal behaviors may reveal more about one's commitment to certain assumptions about the mappings between certain presupposed biological and psychological hierarchies of complexity than it does about one's commitment to parsimony of explanation. (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/class/596v/week11.txt - ressource is archived if not accesible)

Compared with other animal welfare issues, the treatment of shellfish has aroused very little effective opposition. They are commonly boiled alive, though for some dishes living crabs or lobsters are cut up, and for lobster mousse, the flesh is scraped out of the live animal. Perhaps most people see shellfish as cold-blooded creatures that cannot feel pain. This cannot be taken for granted. Crabs and lobsters in particular have complex nervous systems and there is a body of scientific research which suggests that they do feel pain and distress. Oxford University zoologist Dr. John Baker, found that lobsters dropped into boiling water, showed "powerful struggling movements" for up to two minutes and he concluded that these were not reflex actions but indications of pain.

Alternative cooking methods, claimed to be humane, have been put forward by animal welfare organizations. They involve precise techniques of piercing, cutting or freezing which quickly kills the animals, or stun them so that they allegedly feel no pain, immediately before boiling or chopping up.

But even if these methods - which some experts do not accept as humane were universally adopted, shellfish would still have endure often cruel forms of trapping, transport and storage. Traps lost on the seabed or washed ashore onto inaccessible beaches leave their victims trapped indefinitely. Crabs and lobsters are often transported in densely packed containers and stored in overcrowded tanks with their claws tied.

If you believe that these cruelties should be banned, please write to your M.P.

Visit:

The Vegan Society 

Also visit:
The American Anti-Vivisection Society