Chrisopher Cox @ Slate: "It's OK for Vegans to Eat Oysters."

[Ignis]

:banghead:

Because I eat oysters, I shouldn't call myself a vegan. I'm not even a vegetarian. I am a pescetarian, or a flexitarian, or maybe there's an even more awkward word to describe my diet. At first I despaired over losing the vegan badge of honor—I do everything else vegans do—but I got over it. Oysters may be animals, but even the strictest ethicist should feel comfortable eating them by the boatload.

...

Biologically, oysters are not in the plant kingdom, but when it comes to ethical eating, they are almost indistinguishable from plants. Oyster farms account for 95 percent of all oyster consumption and have a minimal negative impact on their ecosystems; there are even nonprofit projects devoted to cultivating oysters as a way to improve water quality. Since so many oysters are farmed, there's little danger of overfishing. No forests are cleared for oysters, no fertilizer is needed, and no grain goes to waste to feed them—they have a diet of plankton, which is about as close to the bottom of the food chain as you can get. Oyster cultivation also avoids many of the negative side effects of plant agriculture: There are no bees needed to pollinate oysters, no pesticides required to kill off other insects, and for the most part, oyster farms operate without the collateral damage of accidentally killing other animals during harvesting.

-- Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2248998/

Here's a decent (albeit brief) rebuttal:
http://supervegan.com/blog/entry.php?id=1472

[flvegan]

1. Oh, for the love of Christmas.

That hurt my head to read.

[Ignis]

2. Logically and ethically inconsistent, to be sure.

And his invocation of St. Singer for some sort of absolution/dispensation was just silly.
:eyes:

[flvegan]

3. Especially since Singer is a philosopher, not a vegan advocate.

[AlienGirl]

8. Mine, too. I do not have enough eyes to roll at that article, but a scallop does...

Oysters show positive resistance to noxious stimuli by closing their shells when something attempts to open them and by secreting nacre around irritants. These actions suggest some kind of pain response, and even though the author presupposes that a CNS is necessary for it to be "true pain" I would argue that a decentralized neuronal network like an oyster's may be capable of suffering--we just don't know yet.

Tucker

[Robeson]

4. What an ass. I'm sorry, but I'm not buying his smarmy shtick....

...not as cute as he thinks it is.

[LeftyMom]

5. Oh, for the love of Pete.

If you eat animals, or animal secretions, then you are not a vegan. This is not a result of vegans being all mean and exclusionary and down on your ethical system, this is a result of that being what the word means.

If this guy wants to create some new ethical system that involves mostly not eating animals except for some that he thinks it's ethical to eat, he can go for it. Hell, considering the current state of the bestseller lists, he could probably come out with yet another book for foodies and make a small fortune telling them that it's okay to eat some animals. But he's not a vegan.

BTW, I want to point out his especially retarded argument about it being okay to eat oysters because they eat plankton and that puts them close to the bottom of the food chain. Y'know what else eats plankton? Blue whales. Sure, they're rare and neurologically complex, but if the argument that being low on the food chain is worthwhile, it's as true for blue whales as for bivalves. Knowing my luck, there's probably a foodie book on gastronomic delights of great whales (Free range AND low on the food chain!) in the works now.

[Ignis]

7. "Oh, I'm a vegan, but I kill and eat blue whales."

:eyes:

Talk about stretching a definition beyond all usefulness, until it loses meaning.

[WillParkinson]

6. Awesome! I love oysters....

Oysters are filter feeders, drawing water in over their gills through the beating of cilia. Suspended plankton and particles are trapped in the mucus of a gill, and from there are transported to the mouth, where they are eaten, digested and expelled as faeces or pseudofaeces. Oysters feed most actively at temperatures above 10 °C (50 °F). An oyster can filter up to 5 litres (1.3 US gal) of water per hour. Chesapeake Bay's once flourishing oyster population historically filtered excess nutrients from the estuary's entire water volume every three to four days. Today that would take nearly a year.<3> Excess sediment, nutrients, and algae can result in the eutrophication of a body of water. Oyster filtration can mitigate these pollutants.

In addition to their gills, oysters can also exchange gases across their mantle, which is lined with many small, thin-walled blood vessels. A small, three-chambered heart, lying under the adductor muscle, pumps colorless blood to all parts of the body. At the same time, two kidneys, located on the underside of the muscle, remove waste products from the blood.

While oysters have two sexes, they may change sex one or more times during their life span. Because of this, it is technically possible for an oyster to fertilize its own egg. The gonads surround the digestive organs, and are made up of sex cells, branching tubules and connective tissue. Oysters cannot be sexed by examining the shell.

===

Hm. Sounds alive to me.

What an idiot.

[kurtzapril4]

9. I'm a vegetarian

But I gotta wonder..since plants also respond to stimulus, and some plants, like dodder, appear to have a sense of smell, what are we going to do when science discovers that plants do react to pain? Scientists are conducting studies on this as I speak. What will we ethically eat?

[Ignis]

10. Those "studies" have been around since the '60s.

The problem is that they weren't often done in controlled conditions, and their results are not able to be duplicated under controlled conditions. That shifts this research from "science" to "pseudoscience" in my book.

Biologists often call this "the Backster effect," after Cleve Backster:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Backster

Here's a lot more detail than you probably wanted: :D
http://www.skepdic.com/plants.html

[kurtzapril4]

11. Well, they are being conducted

in controlled conditions now. Hopefully, this research will find that plants don't have any sort of consciousness. But what if it finds that they do?

Research has already found that dodder seeks out desireable host plants by means of a rudimentary sense of smell.

[Ignis]

12. Hey, I hope they DO find evidence of consciousness, but ...

It's just not likely, given the biology of plants. :shrug:

That being said, I'd still choose to minimize suffering by eating the less sentient being over the more, just as I do now.