Will crabs and lobsters get similar rights to mammals in research?

The use of crabs and lobsters for in vivo toxicology experiments could face new restrictions soon when a law recognizing these animals as sentient beings that can feel pain is passed. The law has been approved by the UK Parliament and is only awaiting “royal consent”.

It will implement the findings in the “Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans” by Jonathan Birch and colleagues in late 2021, which recommends that “all cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans be regarded as sentient animals for the purposes of animal welfare law”.

This way, the protection of decapod crustaceans (including crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, and prawns) will be similar to the protection of cephalopod molluscs (such as a squid, octopus, cuttlefish, or nautilus), already in place both in the UK and the EU.

The current review and future law add weight to the demands raised by animal welfare groups asking for the protection of decapod crustaceans in the EU, where they are not protected, while cephalopod molluscs are since the EU Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes.

The review also asks for the protection of decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs in mass-consumption settings, e.g. by banning the slaughter of decapodan crustaceans by boiling them alive, progressively increasing water temperature, dismemberment, or freshwater immersion. Regarding cephalopods, “no slaughter method is both humane and commercially viable on a large scale”, so codes of best practice and more research are needed.

While this might be a temporal drawback for some researchers, the research community is working hard on developing #NewApproachMethodologies #NAMs that allows avoiding the use of live animals for toxicological research, for example through “dry lab” “in silico” computational methods.

You can check all toxicology models developed by ProtoQSAR in our ProtoPRED platform, and please let us know if you are interested in them or in any other model we might develop!