Don't believe everything you read

"La la la, I can't hear you!"

Around the time I stopped eating animals back in the 80s, a book was published that vegans went absolutely gaga for. I, too, cited claims from this book when telling people why they should Go Vegan!

A few years later, another advocate and I headed over to a big state land-grant university. We went to the various libraries to look up the sources cited in the book.

Not to keep you in suspense: Very, very often, the sources did not say what Vegans claimed.

(Erik Marcus would systematically disprove a few of these claims in his book Meat Market. This did not make him popular with many Vegans or the book's author. I wonder if he, too, was threatened with legal action, as I was.)

I was reminded of this when I was contacted by someone in academia regarding the claim "shrimp matter." This person is writing up their findings in a more rigorous way, but suffice to say: The claims of the "shrimp matter" people are not in line with the literature they cite. 

For example, one of the papers referenced in one of the most famous "shrimp matter" pieces very explicitly contradicts the "shrimp matter" claim. The full 107-page paper lists seven criteria for sentience: integrative brain regions, connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions, motivational trade-offs, self-protective behaviours, etc. 

For shrimp, the authors have high confidence in only one of the seven criteria -- that shrimp have nociceptors. Which, in and of itself, is not an indication of the ability to suffer.

In one study reviewed in the 107-page paper, shrimp did not alter their behaviour at all after experiencing something that should have been "painful." There was no wound tending, they just continued on as before. Another of the studies cited to prove "shrimp matter" also found no evidence of pain-related behaviour in shrimp. 

This doesn't prove that shrimp are unable to suffer -- just that you can't believe claims from advocates, even when they give you "sources." 

How many dollars have been donated by people believing claims attributed to primary sources that actually say the opposite?