The Experience of Pain in Decapod Crustaceans from a Neurobehavioral Perspective: A Challenge for the Invertebrate Welfare Theory

Few consumers are aware that the so-called seafood comes from commercial aquaculture, where lobsters, crabs or shrimps and prawns are kept in cruel conditions of crustaceans factory farming. At the same time, the sentience and neurobehaviour of crustaceans continue to pose challenges for neurobiology, comparative cognition, and ethical reflection. Knowledge about the sentience of decapods, exploited in the food and entertainment industries (pet shops, fishkeeping hobbies, aquafarming), is particularly important for contemporary animal ethics and biopolitics in the context of condemning cruel breeding practices, proposing legal protection of decapods and enforcing welfare standards. For this reason, the article presents the foundation of the sentience phenomenon, which is the ability to experience pain in selected species of crabs, crayfish and prawns. The discussed cases of pain perception seem to be representative of the entire group of farmed decapods. The conclusions resulting from the experiments indicate all decapods should be included as soon as possible in international legal acts to limit brutal forms of breeding, transporting, and slaughtering them.