> The fact this is somehow just dawning on modern society is a sad indictment of our blinkered and callous disregard for other species Well, lobsters eat fish

> The fact this is somehow just dawning on modern society is a sad indictment of our blinkered and callous disregard for other species Well, lobsters eat fish and fish, as any child could explain to you, can experience distress and probably also pain. As far as animals go, both humans and lobsters are quite actually quite nice - there are species out there that poison their prey and eat it alive [0]. So this is not really a "disregard for other species", no more than it's disregard of a fox to eat a deer. Now, of course, by now we could be better than this, I fully agree with you here - but the fact that other species experience pain and distress when ending up as food was basically an universal truth until some very recent human inventions. [0] I know some humans do that, too, but that's far from the general case.