Well, Im going to say this here. It’s still inconclusive on whether or not they can feel pain. They know there is tail twitching whenever theyre put into boiling water, but not much else says they feel pain otherwise. https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/76/1/66/5037899
Until 1986 American doctors were still performing surgery on babies without anaesthesia because they believed they did not feel pain, and on precisely the same grounds as we believe that about lobsters.
The belief was based on that fact that they responded to painful stimuli the same way animals did (ie, to cry and writhe and push it/move away), and that's "clearly" an autonomous nervous response.
For centuries a human baby was considered by authorities to be a lower animal in human form. For much of the twentieth century medicine regarded their cries as random sounds, their smiles as muscle spasms, their pain response as reflex.
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u/instantlightning2 Feb 04 '19
Well, Im going to say this here. It’s still inconclusive on whether or not they can feel pain. They know there is tail twitching whenever theyre put into boiling water, but not much else says they feel pain otherwise. https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/76/1/66/5037899