The Ethics of Eating Bivalves?

[vegimator]

Hey Gelert! Yes, we're definitely on the same page about the risk of algal/microbial contamination. I agree, that is a valid reason not to eat bivalves. Out of curiosity, is the same true then of sea urchins? They share a similarly primitive nervous system and are also farmed.

I'm still unswayed by any of the other arguments though for what it's worth.

Back to bivalves. A colleague of mine recently had a government funded research project to use mussels as indicators of ecosystem health by screening their metabolome and analyzing for biomarkers of stress or intoxication. The idea is roughly: healthy mussels = healthy ecosystem. He did this for two reasons, firstly their tendency to bioaccumulate toxins. Secondly as I've said before they are keystone species which initiate the formation of a natural habitat upon which diverse species depend.

If there was some debate about whether beavers were sentient or not, there would be strong grounds upon which not to kill them because of the attendant effects on an entire habitat comprising many unquestionably sentient species. So it is with bivalves in the aquatic habitat. Which, ocean acidification aside, is largely untouched.

Except that this is irrelevant because farming bivalves (at least as currently practiced) has little to no impact on wild bivalve populations so their position as indicators is unharmed.

At this point I will rebutt your arguments about carrots. Land based agriculture has been in existence for many centuries and its consequence is major habitat manipulation. Very few if any areas used for farming bear anything like a resemblance to their native state. The horse has bolted - centuries ago. The land is as industrialized as any factory zone.

I'm sorry but I have to completely disagree. The harm caused by conventional farming (erosion, runoff, fish death, topsoil loss, petroleum reliance, heavy carbon footprint, use of animal manure, etc etc) is ongoing and will have to change and soon if we're going to have a sustainable food supply. Humans are actually getting quite good at returning lands to something resembling their native states (search habitat reclamation for examples). Despite that, we don't need land in its native state, but we do need sustainable practices likes permaculture/forest gardening. The Permavegan blog is an asset there (this post is a good primer on why we need veganic permaculture http://permavegan.blogspot.com/2010/01/ ... unity.html)

We better hope that horse hasn't bolted, because if it has, we're all fucked.

I am very glad to see that you are one of the few vegans open to the possibility that sentience or at least related phenomena are not exclusive to the animal kingdom.

I suppose I'm open to the idea enough that if someone showed me strong evidence to that effect, I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand, but I certainly don't believe it exists. It seems strange to me that you would use the possibility of plant sentience as a reason in favor of veganism. It's true, eating farmed plants instead of animals that eat those plants is more efficient and would harm fewer sentient beings if plants were sentient. However, think of how virtuous it would be to hunt wild rhinos or gorillas. You'd be preventing the deaths of countless sentient plants.

who is to say that a flux of ions and release of salicylic acid in plants does not amount to the same thing as a flux of ions and a release of arachidonic acid in humans?

I had kind of expected you to say something about how consciousness is not uniform so the death of a more conscious creature is worth quite a lot more than the deaths of many (many) plants. Instead you went the opposite direction and tried to illustrate that plants could be just as conscious as humans! If all things are equal (ethically), then why should we eat like they're not?

I'm not convinced by your cell signaling analogy though. What is the plant equivalent of the cerebral cortex? I don't doubt that information is channeled in plants causing them to act in specific ways, but you've given me nothing to indicate how a plant could possibly have awareness of these goings on. There are thousands of chemical conversations going on in my body right now, but I'm not aware of any of them and that awareness is what matters.

On top of that, a rose is sufficiently different from a frog that you could say there are alternate biological processes at work with considerably more plausibility than you can an oyster, which does have a nervous system. It's just an extraordinarily primitive one. What possible evolutionary advantage could there be to an oyster having two parallel nervous systems- one operating how all known nervous systems operate and simultaneously, one completely foreign and undiscovered?

The trouble with sentience is that it is bandied around by many to convey whatever they want. If we settle on the best-accepted definitions it is to be able to sense your environment and be aware of it. Websters' goes further to distinguish between sentience and the ability to think.

Using that definition, most of life is sentient. There are fungal spores that can sense they have landed on a plant's leaf

Sensing and awareness are completely different things in this context. My computer keyboard can sense my finger pressure and responds by sending data to the cpu. It is not aware of my fingers in any meaningful way though.

Now if you want to deny the mussels' sentience, then I'm afraid you are willfully ignorant of what sentience means. Enhydra Lutris (and as it happens she is a scientist with an MSc and a PhD in aquatic biology and over ten years' experience in the field, so I do take her word about bivalve bothering seriously!) mussels are sentient. They sense a danger (from poking) to theirselves, they take defensive action (clamp shut) and ultimately take evasive action (by swimming away). They do this by making a decision that the danger from your poking is more significant than the danger from losing out on available resources by staying put, and so bugs out. It is exactly as sentient as taking a sip deciding a cup of tea is too hot and will scald you even on a cold day.

That fits the bill for sentience by agreed definitions. QED?

Yes, if you could prove to me that they actually made a decision rather than reacted automatically based on evolved subconscious defense mechanisms. It's possible, but I'm still not convinced that they're conscious at all, much less as conscious as an ant. If you're willing to believe reaction to disturbance is enough to indicate sentience, then the proof that insects are sentient is overwhelming and the willful consumption of produce is still harming more sentient creatures than oyster farming (provided there isn't a microbial outbreak or something). And again, plants respond to disturbance too. Are trees deciding to release alarm chemicals when they're disturbed or is that an evolved defense mechanism?

I strongly disagree with the idea that this is in any way arbitary. Firstly for the reasons shown above - bivalves are sentient.

You haven't demonstrated to me that they're more sentient than plants and you even seem half convinced that plants are sentient anyway.

Secondly, even if not, there is clear and unambiguous evidence, from traditional methods right on through to DNA and other molecular analyses that robustly place bivalves within the animal kingdom.

I'm not saying that placing them in the animal kingdom is arbitrary. I'm saying that within a system of ethics that intends to avoid harm to sentient creatures, protecting animals that are not any more (and probably less) sentient than the insects killed in the production of our plant food - that is arbitrary.

If we were having arguments about poriferans, I might be more ambivalent, but not about bivalves.

I'm guessing you'd be more ambivalent because they have no nerve cells whatsoever? But neither do plants and you were just making a case for their sentience.

I anticipate your counterargument here to be about the potential for sentience not to be exclusively animal, and while I agree that may be the case, there are many good reasons to make the distinction in the first instance.

1. Quality of evidence. The evidence base is stronger and better established for animals than other organisms and therefore the argument is better rooted

2. Pragmaticism. If everything is sentient, what do we eat? We are not well adapted to chemolithotrophy.

3. Ease of discussing the matter with non-specialists. If something is perfect in principle but impossible in practice it is still impossible. I look forward to the day when we better appreciate the amazing diversity of life on this planet for how it really is rather than how we percieve it. But that day is a long way away.

4. An argument of energy. Is this not wasted energy? As much as I enjoy this discourse, it is a luxury and a displacement activity from issues that are far more significant with regards to veganism. People get hung up about reading ingredients lists as it is.

All four of these amount to "it's easier to lump the few potentially non-sentient animals in with other animals." That is not particularly persuasive to me as to whether or not it's ethical to eat a bivalve. As Peter Singer discusses in Practical Ethics, lumping causes major ethical problems. For instance, women on average score lower than men on standardized math tests. Does that mean it's right to say that women are not as good at math as men? No, because there is a range of values on both sides and a given woman could be better at math than a randomly selected man. Evaluating cases individually and rigorously is essential to understanding and progress in many pursuits including ethics.

5. An utilitarian argument of most good. If you think plants are sentient, the best thing to do is to be vegan. You will still consume them, but by cutting out the unquestionably sentient middleman of a cow, you are being a lot more efficient in the amount of plants consumed per calorie of energy derived.

Unless you're hunting and eating wild bison or other large animals that are eating vast amounts of plants.

So it is with other resources, and there are solid arguments to be made that the environmental benefits of not consuming animals (mitigating CO2 & CH4 emission, reducing habitat destruction and water use) will benefit ALL of life.

In general, I strongly believe in the environmental benefits of veganism, especially if we ever achieve widespread veganic permaculture. However, I don't think the environmental argument works well in this instance. Algal toxins and microbial poisoning aside (yes, that's a bit of a caveat hehe), current bivalve farming techniques are far superior environmentally to conventional (or probably even organic) farming for all the reasons I've listed repeatedly. Additionally, aquaponic farming is starting to take off. An aquaponic farm that grows veggies and bivalves (using their waste as fertilizer) is pretty hard to beat for sustainability.

So, eat oysters if you will, but please, it ain't vegan

I've never had oysters, never plan to and never said they're vegan. I just don't see why we can't accept that there might be another diet that's also ethically sound.

[Gelert]

A few quick points, as I'm a bit rushed atm.

Humans are actually getting quite good at returning lands to something resembling their native states (search habitat reclamation for examples).

No, we are not. Pop up to Prince William Sound in Alaska. Multibillion dollar cleanup effort. Turn over a rock. See the oil. We are good at spinning this (e.g. exxon spent $90K per animal to "treat" contaminated sea otters. They only did a plane load (about 250) - the thousands of the others died.) For example.

Likewise because the way ecology works (succession, for example) it is impossible to turn back the clocks to a prehuman landscape. Certain wildlife trusts and individuals harbour the delusion that you can re-wild, even by introducing alien species... Consider for example the uplands of Wales. Before agricultural efforts deforested them they were covered in thick deciduous forest. Centuries of heavy rainfall, leaching and bad land management have rendered the soil refractile to anything but conifer plantations and windfarms. It would be impossible to restore without some kind of complete soil transplant. Tipping points are reached quickly in this kind of thing - so yes, the horse has bolted, and we are fucked. I live in the UK, where despite the observation of a green and pleasant land it is virtually ALL manmade.

current bivalve farming techniques are far superior environmentally to conventional (or probably even organic) farming for all the reasons I've listed repeatedly.

I am suspicious of this assertion. If only for the reasons I have highlighted with regards to their importance as a keystone species and their attributes as an ecosystem engineer. I.e. their form habitats for other species and structure the ecosystem. Beavers are the textbook example of this in terrestrial systems. You would not introduce or remove them from their habitat without expecting profound and far-reaching impacts.

Except that this is irrelevant because farming bivalves (at least as currently practiced) has little to no impact on wild bivalve populations so their position as indicators is unharmed.

You misunderstand me. It is very relevant for the reasons I reminded you of above - due to their central importance to many coastal habitats. Cart/horse. It's for this reason that they are of value as indicators, hence why I mentioned this.

It's just an extraordinarily primitive one.

No it isn't. It's entirely fit for purpose for an oyster. There is no such thing as "primitive" in biology when all extant organisms represent the current day peak in fitness subsequent to 3.8 billion years of evolution by natural selection, give or take a week or two.

two parallel nervous systems- one operating how all known nervous systems operate and simultaneously, one completely foreign and undiscovered?

I don't know. Perhaps the same as having two parallel immune systems -one operating how all known immune systems operate and simultaneously, one completely foreign and undiscovered until recently. I speak of course of innate immunity in invertebrates as a rough example of exactly this kind of thing.

Unless you're hunting and eating wild bison or other large animals that are eating vast amounts of plants.

Please consider the pyramid of biomass for beef and the intensity of agriculture to support that inefficiency.

I'm guessing you'd be more ambivalent because they have no nerve cells whatsoever?

Partly. But the earlier comments (repeated by other posters) were that bivalves weren't really "animal" - and as can be shown they are well seated in an intermediate position in the animal TofL. Poriferans are basal. I imagine they're fairly well seated but one only has to look at our immediate neighbours the Fungi to see how basal fungi are sometimes flipped around (e.g. the microsporidia - for years thought to be animals, now considered fungi - and resisted furiously by the zoologists studying them!). Because the TofL is an anthropogenic imposition on the living world it is subject to the limitations of our knowledge and is in flux at its edges. It is unquestionable that bivalves are animals, but sometimes the placement of basal organisms is subject to change.

What is the plant equivalent of the cerebral cortex?

Didn't you say yourself that it was a moot point to rely on "morally irrelevant appendages"?

I don't think I've got much more to add to this discussion until we can agree on the definitions of the following:

Process
Mechanism
Sentience

I say this, as you seem to insist that if something does not share the same mechanism, it can not achieve the same process. And this is fundamental. (consider the flipside, it is entirely possible to have a cerebral cortex and not be sentient - answers on a postcard!)

And finally- every dictionary I've checked in re. sentience has something along the lines of the following:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&sa ... d=0CBQQkAE

I.e. awareness, ability to sense. Etc. If you want to go further and insist on consciousness it tends to over reach what is in common usage!

One final point to ponder:

Yes, if you could prove to me that they actually made a decision rather than reacted automatically based on evolved subconscious defense mechanisms.

By all standards, you are a sentient animal (please don't let me damn you with faint praise! ) Imagine the following scenario. I poke you in the arm with a really fucking big pencil while you're eating lunch. Your aversive response, as a sentient animal does not require your cerebral cortex. It is entirely down to a somatic reflex arc between your afferent sensory nerves to your spinal cord and into your motor nerve. You experience pain as a result of this.

Now, assuming you haven't assaulted my sentience with an uppercut, I poke you again. And again. Eventually you adopt an evasive response and leave the dining room at the cost of half your lunch.

This is almost exactly the anthropomorphised equivalent of what the poor mussel experiences when repeatedly poked by a HB. I could have couched it in terms of performing a GCS on a comatose patient, but I think this is more direct. As an objective observer, I am satisfied that not only does it sense its environment, determine that your intrusion is innimical, and take aversive action, but then when faced with further provocation it takes a decision that the threat to it is more significant than the loss of resources and relocates.

If you had a mussel-adapted Glasgow Coma Scale it would be scoring equivalent to a conscious person. I would argue that example is pretty much textbook. Which might be why countless undergrads in animal biology classes have wet pencils.

[vegimator]

No, we are not. Pop up to Prince William Sound in Alaska. Multibillion dollar cleanup effort. Turn over a rock. See the oil. We are good at spinning this (e.g. exxon spent $90K per animal to "treat" contaminated sea otters. They only did a plane load (about 250) - the thousands of the others died.) For example.

That's an oil spill. What we're talking about is taking farm land and creating permaculture gardens/forests. This is much different, easier and not problematic. Check out this video where a farmer moves from unsustainable to sustainable methods - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 939737230#

Not to go further derail the conversation, but we are getting better at reclamation of non-agricultural lands too. For instance-
http://www.academicjournals.org/ijbc/ab ... choono.htm
http://www.arkinspace.com/2010/06/prehi ... urope.html

current bivalve farming techniques are far superior environmentally to conventional (or probably even organic) farming for all the reasons I've listed repeatedly.

I am suspicious of this assertion. If only for the reasons I have highlighted with regards to their importance as a keystone species and their attributes as an ecosystem engineer. I.e. their form habitats for other species and structure the ecosystem. Beavers are the textbook example of this in terrestrial systems. You would not introduce or remove them from their habitat without expecting profound and far-reaching impacts.

Right, but oyster farmers aren't removing them from a habitat any more than salmon farmers are removing salmon from their habitats. I really don't understand why you're persisting with this. I don't think it's ethical to eat wild bivalves.

It's just an extraordinarily primitive one.

No it isn't. It's entirely fit for purpose for an oyster. There is no such thing as "primitive" in biology when all extant organisms represent the current day peak in fitness subsequent to 3.8 billion years of evolution by natural selection, give or take a week or two.

You're just taking a different definition of primitive here. It is less elaborate, tiny, containing only two nerve bundles and no central nervous system. I suppose it's the advanced top of the line model for oysters but it is basic compared to even a grasshopper which has a brain:

I don't know. Perhaps the same as having two parallel immune systems -one operating how all known immune systems operate and simultaneously, one completely foreign and undiscovered until recently. I speak of course of innate immunity in invertebrates as a rough example of exactly this kind of thing.

What reason do you have to suspect that the possibility of a second, invisible nervous system in bivalves is more plausible than a single invisible nervous system in plants? Every argument you've made to say that our knowledge of bivalve sentience is fuzzy is undermined by the fact that could just as easily be applied to plants which you see no problem with eating.

Unless you're hunting and eating wild bison or other large animals that are eating vast amounts of plants.

Please consider the pyramid of biomass for beef and the intensity of agriculture to support that inefficiency.

I specifically said hunting wild animals, not farmed. You don't grow food to feed wild bison and you would be preventing the harm to large numbers of (possibily individually sentient) wild grasses. If we had reason to believe that plants were as able to suffer as animals as you seem to think, it would make sense to kill off wild herbivorous animals for food.

What is the plant equivalent of the cerebral cortex?

Didn't you say yourself that it was a moot point to rely on "morally irrelevant appendages"?

The cerebral cortex is considered instrumental for sentience/the ability to suffer. It is not morally irrelevant like the intestines or heart.

Association areas function to produce a meaningful perceptual experience of the world, enable us to interact effectively, and support abstract thinking and language. The parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes - all located in the posterior part of the cortex - organize sensory information into a coherent perceptual model of our environment centered on our body image.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_c ... tion_areas

I'm not saying it's been proven impossible to achieve sentience without a cerebral cortex, but it's hardly irrelevant. Something would have to handle the duties normally handled by the cerebral cortex.

consider the flipside, it is entirely possible to have a cerebral cortex and not be sentient - answers on a postcard!)

Not everything is a two way street however. As a human, it's possible to have a heart and die. It's not possible to be live for long without a heart (I'm including artificial hearts here).

And finally- every dictionary I've checked in re. sentience has something along the lines of the following:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&sa ... d=0CBQQkAE
I.e. awareness, ability to sense. Etc. If you want to go further and insist on consciousness it tends to over reach what is in common usage!

In the philosophy of consciousness, "sentience" can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences, or "qualia"... Sentience is a minimalistic way of defining 'consciousness', which is otherwise commonly used to collectively describe sentience plus other characteristics of the mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

Eventually you adopt an evasive response and leave the dining room at the cost of half your lunch. This is almost exactly the anthropomorphised equivalent of what the poor mussel experiences when repeatedly poked by a HB.

This is exactly as convincing to me that a mussel is sentient as this passage is convincing about plants:

The stilt palm (Allen, 1977) is constructed from a stem raised on prop roots. When competitive neighbours approach, avoidance action is taken by moving the whole plant back into full sunlight. Such obvious ‘walking’ is accomplished by growing new prop roots in the direction of movement while those behind die off. That this is intentional behaviour is very clear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_inte ... _behaviour
Which is to say, not at all.

You haven't really addressed my main argument though which is this. I think you accept that insects are sentient or equally (if not more probably) likely to be sentient as bivalves. They certainly would react to being nudged by a pencil. Why is it better to intentionally engage in one action which kills those sentient insects (and there is much more published research saying that insects could be sentient than there is research on the sentience of bivalves) as a known byproduct than another action which kills bivalves outright (but has few other consequences apart from disease risk)? Especially when you consider that eating conventional produce (which many vegans do) leads to the death of fish - http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmen ... s-47082802

[Enhydra Lutris]

@vegimator

I think we disagree on a fundamental level. I do not care one bit whether something is sentient or not, for me that is way down on the list of reasons for being vegan.

[vegimator]

@vegimator
I think we disagree on a fundamental level. I do not care one bit whether something is sentient or not, for me that is way down on the list of reasons for being vegan.

Why are you vegan then? If you're vegan for health reasons, that's great. This thread is about ethics though.

[Gelert]

@vegimator
I think we disagree on a fundamental level. I do not care one bit whether something is sentient or not, for me that is way down on the list of reasons for being vegan.

Why are you vegan then? If you're vegan for health reasons, that's great. This thread is about ethics though.

The word "veganism" denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude — as far as is possible and practical — all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Says nothing about sentience. Cruelty maybe.

So plenty of reasons mayhaps.

Why are you vegan, anyway, if you think it's arbitary?

That's an oil spill.

Yes. A simple, single, point-source contaminant introduced into a near-pristine environment, as opposed to millenia of landscape "management" - and that can't be fixed even through intensive efforts.

Please note that the "prehistoric landscapes" you refer to are not actually prehistoric landscapes, but the ecological equivalent of an artist's impression of one. Best rewilding project IMO is Chernobyl!


Anyways.

Right, but oyster farmers aren't removing them from a habitat any more than salmon farmers are removing salmon from their habitats. I really don't understand why you're persisting with this. I don't think it's ethical to eat wild bivalves.

I don't see the point of excusing one animal based farming method on the grounds it's seen as OK for similar methods for other animals. Besides, you are missing the point here - there are quite different implications for say removing salmon or removing bivalves considering their functional contribution to creating an ecosystem. Note well, that "wild" or "farmed" bivalves are no different in this respect. This is why I persist...

You're just taking a different definition of primitive here. It is less elaborate, tiny, containing only two nerve bundles and no central nervous system. I suppose it's the advanced top of the line model for oysters but it is basic compared to even a grasshopper which has a brain

You still don't seem to appreciate adaptive radiation. Is your point of view that because bipedal locomotion is biomechanically and anatomically complex then painting legs on a snake is a good idea?

What reason do you have to suspect that the possibility of a second, invisible nervous system in bivalves is more plausible than a single invisible nervous system in plants?

The very notion that you insist they must be invisible?

I disagree completely. These systems are only invisible if you choose to wilfully ignore them by insisting on using mechanism-related benchmarks ("ie. species X has a cerebral cortex, ergo it is sentient!") rather than process-related benchmarks ("ie. species X responds in this way or that way, ergo it is sentient"!)

This is leading you into a cul-de-sac. I note however that you are tending towards a process-orientated approach with regards to plants (for example, your stilt palm moves away but without using muscles etc)

Why is it too difficult for you then to see that the bivalves may be sentient despite lacking a cerebral cortex?

If you insist on this approach, what makes you think that their ganglia cannot assume this kind of function? Or something else entirely? I mean, seeing as their haemolymph contain opiates (morphine and codeine like compounds) released from their ganglia and their immunocytes have opiate receptors showing homology to human opiate receptors. Experiments have even been done on how the mussels release opiates to calm themselves down after being stressed. Not only does this demonstrate they get stressed, but the stresses used (electric shocks and wedging open their shells) affected them for up to 30 hours before they returned to normal. And that they use the same mechanisms as we do for endogenous pain relief.

This is just one example why I consider the cerebral cortex, or any given anatomic feature or marker to be highly morally irrelevant.

Something would have to handle the duties normally handled by the cerebral cortex

.

E.g. the ganglia? E.g something we don't know/understand because we've been sucked into a model of thinking that is constrained by assuming that we represent the peak of evolutionary and cognitive attainment - i.e., if we are sentient, and we are sentient because we have cerebral cortexes, then it's a good surrogate indicator of sentience. Not so fast! I've talked before of the independent evolution of different complex traits such as flight and vision. That should teach us that this mode of thinking is blinkered at best. But it seemingly hasn't.

I specifically said hunting wild animals, not farmed. You don't grow food to feed wild bison

Quick question - how would this model prove sustainable in feeding the exploding population of unquestionably sentient humans over the next 50 years? Likewise the suggestion of feeding the world with oysters. Interesting thinking at a time when even the UN is agreeing that a vegan diet is the way forward!

The stilt palm (Allen, 1977) is constructed from a stem raised on prop roots. When competitive neighbours approach, avoidance action is taken by moving the whole plant back into full sunlight. Such obvious ‘walking’ is accomplished by growing new prop roots in the direction of movement while those behind die off. That this is intentional behaviour is very clear.

Hmm. Interesting, but a little knowledge from wikipedia may have misled you here - specifically the sentence on "intentional behaviour is very clear". It is intentional in the sense it is not happenstance, but this is down to a phototropic response mediated by phytohormones. In terms of process and mechanism it is analogous to say, secondary sexual development in humans and not. Although it is a good example of the kind of thing that should be investigated it is clear to me that this is not as fine-tuned or escalatory a response as shown by our mussel friend.

Here's an article you might enjoy on "plant intelligence"

http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/93/4/353

To investigate plant intelligence, cues should be taken from animal ethologists who 30–40 years ago faced the same limited proscription on the use of the word intelligence (humans only). They simply went out, observed animals in the wild and found intelligent behaviour wherever they looked. Plant scientists should be doing the same...

Both as someone trained in the reductionist and mechanism-focused fields of cell and molecular biology type things and someone annually deluged by a lecture theatre full of keen young things wanting to "work with dolphins" for their animal behaviour degrees when the reality is that even the few that succeed in going beyond BSc level will seldom if ever fiddle with flipper, it pains me to say this.

But the answer is that sentience must be investigated as a behavioural phenomenon using appropriate behavioural methodologies for the organism in question. One simply cannot utilize a given mechanism or anatomic structure as an indicator as the potential ubiquity of complex sensory if not sentient behaviour throughout the living world is likely to pre-date any one evolved mechanism. This has been borne out by many other complex capabilities such as social behaviour, immunity, flight, vision etc. and it would surprise me if it is not the case for sentience.

I don't think I can say it clearer than that, and hope that explains why I think bivalves are quite likely to be sentient even if they don't have a cerebral cortex - so I will leave it there!

[vegimator]

I'm disappointed that you completely skipped my main point (the final thing I wrote). I won't restate it since we seem to be at an impasse, but that is the central issue I think.

Says nothing about sentience. Cruelty maybe.

It's hard to be cruel to something that isn't sentient.

Why are you vegan, anyway, if you think it's arbitary?

A responsible vegan diet (ie, organic whenever possible, low in grains, local when possible, food from your own veganic garden if possible) causes the lowest amount of harm of any diet that I can think of with the possible exclusion of a diet that's vegan plus farmed bivalves. And I have no desire to eat slimy creatures that repulse me, especially when there are valid reasons not to (algal toxins, etc). We need to be vigilant though and open to the possibility that ours isn't the only ethical path so that we don't simply adhere to a rigid dogma.

That's an oil spill.

Yes. A simple, single, point-source contaminant introduced into a near-pristine environment, as opposed to millenia of landscape "management" - and that can't be fixed even through intensive efforts.

But planting a permaculture forest over farmland can and has been done. That is the only relevant point.

I don't see the point of excusing one animal based farming method on the grounds it's seen as OK for similar methods for other animals.

That's not at all what I'm saying. You keep saying that oysters need to remain in place as they're important to the environment and I keep saying that current and future oyster farming operations have little to no impact on that. I just mentioned salmon as an illustration that breeding animals in captivity has no bearing on their wild brethren.

You still don't seem to appreciate adaptive radiation. Is your point of view that because bipedal locomotion is biomechanically and anatomically complex then painting legs on a snake is a good idea?

You're implying that because creatures are physiologically adapted to meet our own needs, we're somehow all equally likely to be sentient? It doesn't follow.

Why is it too difficult for you then to see that the bivalves may be sentient despite lacking a cerebral cortex?

I don't rule out the possibility that I could be wrong and that bivalves have a very basic sentience. It seems unlikely to me though. What I do think is difficult to understand is how anyone could accept that the possibility of bivalve sentience is the primary reason to avoid eating them and then simultaneously be okay with eating food which we know causes harm to animals who far exceed your behavioral tests for sentience (insects, field mice, fish). The reason that I insist on physical evidence is that the behavioral evidence you present is extremely similar to be behavior found in plants. And I'm now confused as to whether or not you believe plants are sentient. I think they're obviously not and if I felt otherwise, I'd have trouble eating them every day. The article you linked to about plant intelligence only convinced me of this further. The intelligence shown by plant behavior and the "bacterial intelligence" that was also referenced would imply by your reading that advanced beings like humans are made up of many organs and systems which could be categorized as sentient individually. I think it's much more plausible however, that there are complex biological processes and interactions happening below the radar onto which we project awareness. When you speak of intelligence on the level of bacteria, you're stripping away the typical meaning. The process by which "seeds communicate their number to determine fruit size," may be ingenious but it doesn't demonstrate that the plant as a whole (or even any part of the plant) has any meaningful awareness. It's like saying that a car is intelligent because when someone touches the locked door, it sets off a car alarm.

If you insist on this approach, what makes you think that their ganglia cannot assume this kind of function? Or something else entirely? I mean, seeing as their haemolymph contain opiates (morphine and codeine like compounds) released from their ganglia and their immunocytes have opiate receptors showing homology to human opiate receptors. Experiments have even been done on how the mussels release opiates to calm themselves down after being stressed. Not only does this demonstrate they get stressed, but the stresses used (electric shocks and wedging open their shells) affected them for up to 30 hours before they returned to normal. And that they use the same mechanisms as we do for endogenous pain relief.

This is something that should have been said much earlier! This is the best argument I've heard by far. Why were you sitting on this? Can you link me to a study?

Something would have to handle the duties normally handled by the cerebral cortex

.

E.g. the ganglia?

I do have to stress again here that the ganglia are far smaller in size and number than that of a grasshopper (which also has other neurological organs). If this is what's handling higher functions, it is extremely reasonable to suppose that clams have a much smaller capacity to suffer than the insects we don't mind killing by proxy every day.

E.g something we don't know/understand because we've been sucked into a model of thinking that is constrained by assuming that we represent the peak of evolutionary and cognitive attainment

All of which also applies to plants which you are okay with eating.

Quick question - how would this model prove sustainable in feeding the exploding population of unquestionably sentient humans over the next 50 years? Likewise the suggestion of feeding the world with oysters. Interesting thinking at a time when even the UN is agreeing that a vegan diet is the way forward!

Obviously I wasn't suggesting that the world adapt that mode of eating! As an individual though, one would be preventing the deaths of many more potentially sentient beings (grasses).

Hmm. Interesting, but a little knowledge from wikipedia may have misled you here - specifically the sentence on "intentional behaviour is very clear". It is intentional in the sense it is not happenstance, but this is down to a phototropic response mediated by phytohormones. In terms of process and mechanism it is analogous to say, secondary sexual development in humans and not. Although it is a good example of the kind of thing that should be investigated it is clear to me that this is not as fine-tuned or escalatory a response as shown by our mussel friend.

Now you're going the other direction by saying that this ability, uniquely fine-tuned to the exact needs of the plant in question is crude and not an illustration of sentience. A phototropic response requires the ability to sense light and you earlier suggested that sensory abilities are all that's needed to meet the definition of sentience.

[Gelert]

We are at a bit of an impasse it would seem.

Why is it better to intentionally engage in one action which kills those sentient insects...as a known byproduct than another action which kills bivalves outright?

A few reasons.

I did not answer your apparently crucial point as I think the vegan society's definition covers it in spades. It is practical and possible to exclude all forms of exploitation and/or cruelty to bivalves and to do so would be to dispense with products derived partly or wholly from animals. On the other hand, it is impractical and impossible to exclude the offchance that insects were harmed in the production of plant food and the product is not derived partly or wholly for food. I'm sorry if it seems like I'm clinging to a definition, but we've seen what the elasticity behind the concept of sentience is stretched to, so we may as well agree on one definition for veganism.

I think the distinction is if you put a plateful of maggots in front of a vegan they would not eat them. That would be the apt comparison between insects and bivalves - not incidental or secondary mortality. By analogy, most people opposed to the Iraq war, even peace activists, would still be paying taxes and using the fossil fuels claimed as the real casus belli.

You need only look at veganism's stance on honey to identify the distinction.

A responsible vegan diet (ie, organic whenever possible, low in grains, local when possible, food from your own veganic garden if possible) causes the lowest amount of harm of any diet that I can think of with the possible exclusion of a diet that's vegan plus farmed bivalves.

This I would agree with, although your final suggestion falls foul of Occam's razor clam. A vegan diet is sustainable - why add to it?

We need to be vigilant though and open to the possibility that ours isn't the only ethical path so that we don't simply adhere to a rigid dogma.

I agree with this fully. I've raised similar points before on here.

But planting a permaculture forest over farmland can and has been done. That is the only relevant point.

No, it's still irrelevant. A permaculture forest is still that artist's impression of nature, albeit a good sketch. I assume you are conversant with the concept of biomimicry as it applies in this context?

You keep saying that oysters need to remain in place as they're important to the environment and I keep saying that current and future oyster farming operations have little to no impact on that. I just mentioned salmon as an illustration that breeding animals in captivity has no bearing on their wild brethren

By this you seem to deny a captive oyster its entity as an oyster. You are aware that many oyster farming operations involve seeding oyster banks which means that harvesting them has just the same impacts on the ecosystem. Equally, closed or semi-closed oyster farming operations can introduce diseases which spread to wild populations. Salmon farming in pens have massive impacts to natural habitats btw.

You still don't seem to appreciate adaptive radiation. Is your point of view that because bipedal locomotion is biomechanically and anatomically complex then painting legs on a snake is a good idea?

You're implying that because creatures are physiologically adapted to meet our own needs, we're somehow all equally likely to be sentient? It doesn't follow

It doesn't follow because you don't follow. Please don't be offended but you don't seem to have a concept of adaptive radiation. I'll let wikipedia offer a reasonable explanation for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_radiation

I am in no way implying what you're suggesting, in fact I am at a loss as to how you think that. In the simplest English possible, what I mean by analogy is:

A snake can move perfectly well without limbs. To add limbs because we have limbs, and they are mechanically complicated is to overcomplicate what is already a perfectly good means of locomotion.

I don't rule out the possibility that I could be wrong and that bivalves have a very basic sentience. It seems unlikely to me though.

I don't rule out the possibility I am wrong either. However as a biologist every line of evidence I have seen satisfies me that it's likely that they are sentient to at least a degree. I don't specialize in invertebrate or marine biology though - but Enhydra Lutris does and she has serious credentials in the field. I don't want to disrespect your contribution or elevate mine/ours by argument from authority, but it seems as if you are an interested layperson - might you want to factor that in a little?

The intelligence shown by plant behavior and the "bacterial intelligence" that was also referenced would imply by your reading that advanced beings like humans are made up of many organs and systems which could be categorized as sentient individually.

Oh, indeed. However those organs exhibit division of labour and interedependence to attain homeostasis to the extent that if you brainwashed a member of the ALF into taking a rusty scalpel to someone's liver to liberate the sentient cells within, they would promptly stop being sentient by virtue of pegging it. A good exception is certain lines of cells grown in artificial tissue culture. The most notable, HeLa cells are derived from someone who died from aggressive cervical cancer in 1951. They've been growing aggressively ever since. It has been proposed that they should be recognized as an independent species. Google for Helacyton gartleri. This is an interesting issue if meat derived from cultured tissue ever becomes commercially viable (were it not that most tissue cultures require lashings of animal juices such as serum from foetal calves).

The microbes are a different story. Many of them are capable of survival independent of host, although some are obligate symbionts (it's a seldom raised point, but what happens to the obligate microbial symbionts of an endangered species?) and there are clear examples of complex social behaviour and other properties usually considered the reserve of "advanced" organisms in microbes. They are completely neglected - consider that article by Tony Trewavas - he confidently states that plants are 99% of the world's biomass. Completely ignorant of microbes. A prominent paper two or three years before concluded that bacteria alone accounted for an equal amount of biomass to plants and ten times as much nutrient cycling. But conveniently ignored. Microbiologists are increasingly being listened to though, and concepts such as the human supraorganism are being bandied around now. It's borne out of the observation that 90% of the cells of any given human are microbial, not human. And they obviously have major roles, some of which we know, some we don't. And they are all happily chatting away with each other - peptide and acyl homoserine lactones based quorum sensing, for example.

So we have an incredibly biased and myopic view of the living world, that I will say. I digress.

It's like saying that a car is intelligent because when someone touches the locked door, it sets off a car alarm.

No it is not. The car gives the illusion of intelligence thanks to the imprint of the human engineer's intelligence which has designed sensors, integratory centres and effectors. Can we agree that biological evolution occurs by natural selection and not intelligent design? If so, then the distinction between the car and the mussel or plant becomes obvious!

the plant as a whole (or even any part of the plant) has any meaningful awareness

They do. I'm sure that article must talk somewhere about systemic acquired resistance in the wake of localized hypersensitive response. Essentially, in hypersensitive response, one bit of the plant suffers attack from an insect or pathogen, that bit detects pathogen gene products and kills itself and hopefully takes the pest with it. If that fails, the SAR is mediated by a plant hormone (actually a precursor of aspirin) which tells the other bits of the plant to switch on defence mechanisms. This plant hormone can be modified into a volatile form (oil of wintergreen) which can spread to neighbouring plants to warn them as well.

This is something that should have been said much earlier! This is the best argument I've heard by far. Why were you sitting on this? Can you link me to a study?

I'd forgotten it mostly and it took a while to track down a relevant study to check myself. I won't link to a study here as most of them do involve doing nasty things to bivalves and this is a vegan website! But if you google for "bivalve opiate" and "bivalve opioid" you will find several studies discussing evidence for opiate and opioid release by basal ganglia in response to stresses and that some adding that human endogenous opioids kick off the same responses, suggesting homology in the process between human responses to stress and bivalve responses.

I do have to stress again here that the ganglia are far smaller in size and number than that of a grasshopper (which also has other neurological organs). If this is what's handling higher functions, it is extremely reasonable to suppose that clams have a much smaller capacity to suffer than the insects we don't mind killing by proxy every day.

Size isn't everything. Just think of the giant nerve fibres of cephalopods - using your argument it would suggest that cephalopods are far more intelligent than humans on the assumption that their bandwidth is much bigger than our microscopic nerves. They're not - it's just that the lack of myelination forces them to be this big to work with any semblance of efficiency.

Mentioning cephalopods, they're regarded to be the most intelligent of all the invertebrates. They are of course a sister class to the bivalves within the mollusc phylum. What a different story as far as human perception of intelligence is concerned! It's probably in part due to the size of their nerve fibres making them experimentally tractable for studying nerve function...

All of which also applies to plants which you are okay with eating.

Yes. I assume from your statement that you are also vegan and that you are like every other human an obligate heterotroph that you're also OK with eating...

I'm not well suited to phototrophy or chemolithotrophy, so something sadly has to give.

Obviously I wasn't suggesting that the world adapt that mode of eating! As an individual though, one would be preventing the deaths of many more potentially sentient beings (grasses).

Then why bother? You or I, or you or I combined will have a negligable impact on things. Other than salving our own conscience about having blood or phloem on our hands. Which is also of negligable consequence.

We also know that even small groups of people adapting this mode of diet can have major impacts - e.g. bushmeat.

Now you're going the other direction by saying that this ability, uniquely fine-tuned to the exact needs of the plant in question is crude and not an illustration of sentience. A phototropic response requires the ability to sense light and you earlier suggested that sensory abilities are all that's needed to meet the definition of sentience.

A little. But the nature of this mechanism is that you have a gradient of the phytohormone within the plant's tissue and where you have more of it, you have more growth as genes involved in cell division are expressed in response to the hormone. This is not unique to stilt palms or even plants (for example Phycomyces fungi). The textbook example is something called apical dominance which is what drives a positive phototropic response in plants (i.e. they grow to the light) because the concentrations of the growth hormone are highest in the tips.

In this way it is more like the differentiation of animal embryos, where you have all kinds of gradients being set up in fertilized eggs firing off circuits of gene expression.

As an example of sentience, it's even inferior to the example of bacteria growing to create fractal patterns.



The net result for humans is a pretty fractal pattern made by Paenibacillus dendritiformis, but it occurs as the bacteria sense gradients in nutrients and grow in directions to maximize their distance from other bacterial cells in the colony so all can profit equably from the limited resources.

Best put down that live soy yogurt!

[vegimator]

Since we don't really seem to be getting anywhere and no one else is jumping into the fray, I'm unsubscribing from this thread and you can have the last word if you want. Here are my final thoughts.

Why is it better to intentionally engage in one action which kills those sentient insects...as a known byproduct than another action which kills bivalves outright?

A few reasons.
I did not answer your apparently crucial point as I think the vegan society's definition covers it in spades. It is practical and possible to exclude all forms of exploitation and/or cruelty to bivalves and to do so would be to dispense with products derived partly or wholly from animals. On the other hand, it is impractical and impossible to exclude the offchance that insects were harmed in the production of plant food and the product is not derived partly or wholly for food. I'm sorry if it seems like I'm clinging to a definition, but we've seen what the elasticity behind the concept of sentience is stretched to, so we may as well agree on one definition for veganism.

I didn't ask why is it vegan. I asked why is it better. And it is practical to reduce insect exploitation/cruelty by not eating grains for instance or maintaining one's own garden and being careful about insects when harvesting. There's no reason someone couldn't replace some of the calories/protein their diet currently coming from canned beans for instance (the US allows up to "an average of 5 or more cowpea curculio larvae" per can which doesn't even take into account insects harmed at harvest) with clams.

It's strange that you refer to the harm of insects as an "offchance." It's unavoidable, especially in grain production. The US FDA allows an average of 150 insect fragments per 100 grams of wheat flour.

By analogy, most people opposed to the Iraq war, even peace activists, would still be paying taxes and using the fossil fuels claimed as the real casus belli.

That's not a very apt analogy. People don't have the option of paying taxes for only things they support and if they stop paying them they risk harsh consequences.

This I would agree with, although your final suggestion falls foul of Occam's razor clam. A vegan diet is sustainable - why add to it?

I'm not adding to it personally, but veganism's succinctness is not a morally valid reason to exclude equally low-harm food.

But planting a permaculture forest over farmland can and has been done. That is the only relevant point.

No, it's still irrelevant. A permaculture forest is still that artist's impression of nature, albeit a good sketch.

Why does this matter? The question is whether or not it's a functional change to our farmland. It is. Maybe I misread your initial argument about the horse bolting the gate. I thought you were saying that mono-crop agriculture is unstoppable and that farmland is unchangeable in response to my assertion that we desperately need to change the way we farm. But in the last couple exchanges you've been arguing about the inability of man to return land to its unaltered state. You're probably right that this can't be done with complete exactitude, but what relevance does that have to our conversation?

By this you seem to deny a captive oyster its entity as an oyster. You are aware that many oyster farming operations involve seeding oyster banks which means that harvesting them has just the same impacts on the ecosystem. Equally, closed or semi-closed oyster farming operations can introduce diseases which spread to wild populations. Salmon farming in pens have massive impacts to natural habitats btw.

No doubt, certain methods of farming oysters are more ethical than others but I've read that most use the suspended net method:
"Suspended Culture
This method may vary between suspended tray culture or lantern net culture. The purpose of this method is to allow for growing oysters in deeper, sub tidal waters. The oysters are placed in trays or nets which are suspended from floats or sub-tidal longlines so that they hang below the surface of the water 24 hours per day allowing for the oysters to grow very fast. "
http://www.penncoveshellfish.com/Farmin ... sters.html

What impact does that have on oyster populations which are nowhere nearby?

It doesn't follow because you don't follow. Please don't be offended but you don't seem to have a concept of adaptive radiation. I'll let wikipedia offer a reasonable explanation for you.

I do know what you meant by the analogy and what adaptive radiation is (though I did have to read that wikipedia entry last time. As you know, I am a layperson!). I just guessed wrong how you were applying the analogy. I take it that you were saying that eating bivalves is painting legs on a snake (veganism). Again, I'm not saying veganism should change or even any of us should change our diets. Recognizing validity in other philosophies does not necessarily invalidate our own.

I don't rule out the possibility that I could be wrong and that bivalves have a very basic sentience. It seems unlikely to me though.

I don't rule out the possibility I am wrong either. However as a biologist every line of evidence I have seen satisfies me that it's likely that they are sentient to at least a degree. I don't specialize in invertebrate or marine biology though - but Enhydra Lutris does and she has serious credentials in the field. I don't want to disrespect your contribution or elevate mine/ours by argument from authority, but it seems as if you are an interested layperson - might you want to factor that in a little?

Enhydra Lutris is the scientific name of the sea otter. Are you telling me a sea otter is a highly credentialed marine biologist?

Regardless, after reading more about the opiod stress response, I think I now agree with you that bivalves may have some capacity to suffer. What would really satisfy me though is any evidence that on average, a typical vegan meal results in fewer deaths of insects than the deaths involved in a meal that replaced say, beans and/or grains with oysters or clams.

Since insects have opioid systems, we can't exclude them. Taking into account the consequences to insects would make beer highly unethical (10 grams of hops may contain up to 2500 aphids - http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceComplia ... 056174.htm)

The most notable, HeLa cells are derived from someone who died from aggressive cervical cancer in 1951. They've been growing aggressively ever since. It has been proposed that they should be recognized as an independent species. Google for Helacyton gartleri. This is an interesting issue if meat derived from cultured tissue ever becomes commercially viable (were it not that most tissue cultures require lashings of animal juices such as serum from foetal calves).

I'm actually very familiar with the story of the HeLa cell line. There's a related story that's actually quite appropriate here. When Henrietta's daughter found out that her mother's cell line was being used worried that her mother couldn't rest in piece because part of her was still alive. This is a pretty interesting listen which includes that story:
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2010/05/ ... us-tumors/

As for vat meat, that's a completely different question. At the risk of further derailing our original conversation, I'm going to talk about it.

In order for it to go forward, it will require a serum devised from non-animal sources, not just to avoid cruelty, but because of the variability of nutrients and risk of disease from using bovine serum. In fact there's been a serum free medium available for years -
"Ultroser G is an example of a commercially available serum substitute specially designed to replace fetal bovine serum for growth of anchorage-dependent cells in
vitro. It has a consistent composition containing growth factors, binding proteins, adhesin factors, vitamins, hormones and mineral trace elements, all necessary for eukaryotic cell growth"
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/da ... _betti.pdf

Here are some a couple of other studies which discuss the high likelihood of an animal free medium.
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/pr ... s_1207.pdf
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/invitromeat.pdf

The car gives the illusion of intelligence thanks to the imprint of the human engineer's intelligence which has designed sensors, integratory centres and effectors. Can we agree that biological evolution occurs by natural selection and not intelligent design? If so, then the distinction between the car and the mussel or plant becomes obvious!

Ha, there are many important distinctions between cars and plants or mussels, but the fact that a car is designed is irrelevant to the point I was making. If we don't examine and make judgments based on anatomy as well as behavior, we risk labeling mechanical responses as intelligent. The revelation (to me) of the opioid-stress connection moots this though.

They do. I'm sure that article must talk somewhere about systemic acquired resistance in the wake of localized hypersensitive response. Essentially, in hypersensitive response, one bit of the plant suffers attack from an insect or pathogen, that bit detects pathogen gene products and kills itself and hopefully takes the pest with it. If that fails, the SAR is mediated by a plant hormone (actually a precursor of aspirin) which tells the other bits of the plant to switch on defence mechanisms. This plant hormone can be modified into a volatile form (oil of wintergreen) which can spread to neighbouring plants to warn them as well.

Okay, so do you or don't you believe that plants are sentient creatures? It seems to change depending on the question.

Size isn't everything.Just think of the giant nerve fibres of cephalopods - using your argument it would suggest that cephalopods are far more intelligent than humans on the assumption that their bandwidth is much bigger than our microscopic nerves. They're not - it's just that the lack of myelination forces them to be this big to work with any semblance of efficiency.

Mentioning cephalopods, they're regarded to be the most intelligent of all the invertebrates. They are of course a sister class to the bivalves within the mollusc phylum. What a different story as far as human perception of intelligence is concerned! It's probably in part due to the size of their nerve fibres making them experimentally tractable for studying nerve function.

Or it could be because octopi have solved puzzles and used tools in controlled settings. No, size isn't everything and I never said it was. But all other things being equal, size clearly does make a difference. Using your own example, cephalopods are widely considered to be more intelligent than bivalves and they have larger ganglia. If you compare humans to cephalopods, the physical size of their ganglia may be larger, but they still lack a cerebral cortex, limbic system and other neurological accoutrements which are known to play important roles in intelligence.

All of which also applies to plants which you are okay with eating.

Yes. I assume from your statement that you are also vegan and that you are like every other human an obligate heterotroph that you're also OK with eating...

You might want to reread what you quoted because I didn't make the point that you're okay with eating. I made the point that you're okay with eating plants despite their effects on insects.

Obviously I wasn't suggesting that the world adapt that mode of eating! As an individual though, one would be preventing the deaths of many more potentially sentient beings (grasses).

Then why bother? You or I, or you or I combined will have a negligable (sic) impact on things. Other than salving our own conscience about having blood or phloem on our hands. Which is also of negligable (sic) consequence.

You're taking my hypothetical too far. There are a host of reasons why adapting a diet exclusively of wild herbivorous animals is a terrible idea. I was just making the point that if grass is sentient, the individual act of killing and eating a buffalo (or even just killing it) would cause less harm than eating a bowl of grains.

Best put down that live soy yogurt!

I think that applies more to you than me since I don't buy into plant (or bacterial) sentience!

[Gelert]

In fact there's been a serum free medium available for years -

Notice the detail. It's only suitable for certain kinds of cells grown in adherent monolayer cultures, which would be difficult to produce anything macroscopically 3D with and hence knife-and-fork-able. It is also a lot more expensive to the point that it would be commerically inviable, and if you read that review, the authors point out that it is a bad candidate for scale up. Although its composition is commercially sensitive, I notice from its vendors the facts that it has to be tested for bovine viruses and mycoplasma and its semi-defined (ie. it has complex extracts such as animal proteins etc.) - that it is still animal based.

True animal free media exist but they are even more expensive and limited in application. Do you really think that this is the model in sustainability we should be following though

Enhydra Lutris is the scientific name of the sea otter. Are you telling me a sea otter is a highly credentialed marine biologist?

No. Enhydra lutris is the scientific name of the sea otter. Enhydra Lutris is the only other person who has bothered to take you seriously enough to reply to you. A little respect for your fellow members of the community would not go amiss. Although I note that this is the only thread you've been inclined to post onto, so maybe you don't feel inclined to view this as an online community. If so, fair enough. After this kind of petty attitude I'm less inclined to give you any respect anyway:

negligable (sic)

I'm unsubscribing from this thread and you can have the last word if you want.

That's a shame. I'm not into having the last word, and I suspect I won't, but it doesn't surprise me given the weight of several lines of argument deployed here ranging from environmental impacts (suspended bags or pens are no better!) through to behavioural studies through to molecular phylogenetics through to opiate and opioid signaling that you've tried to counter by repeated irrelevant strawmen arguments about permaculture, insects (do you eat anything with cochineal or honey in it?), arguments from ignorance and hypocrisies about plant and bacterial sentience.

Regardless, after reading more about the opiod stress response, I think I now agree with you that bivalves may have some capacity to suffer.

I take consolation though that the hours I've wasted here have not been all in vain if you now are open to the possibility after five minutes' googling. It's a short cut compared to the 20+ years combined experience and study as biologists that lead Enhydra Lutris and I to our positions on the matter!

[vegimator]

Ha, I'm sorry about the confusion with Enhydra Lutris and I didn't mean to be dismissive of her.

I'm also sorry that you deem me beneath you and this discussion. This isn't the only thread I've posted in (though it was the first because I was excited to see an intelligent discussion on the subject) and I joined because I'm starting to lift weights, not because I wanted to be a troll. I plan on staying part of this community so I hope we can both keep civil.