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This is a perfect question for my husband, a former oyster grower. Here's what he said: First, once you've shucked an oyster, you basically kill it. They are alive in their shells, but when opened, they are killed. When you eat raw oysters, they are just that -- raw, but not alive.

If your remaining oysters are unopened but are still fresh, you can steam them like you do mussels. Let them open on their own in the steaming stock and like mussels, don't eat any that won't open. Then remove them from their shells and you can freeze them and use them later in soups, sauces, etc.

If they are unopened and not fresh and have to be disposed of, the kindest way to kill them is the same as you do with a lobster -- throw them in boiling water. Obviously, if anyone has problems with this, they probably shouldn't eat them. There's no way to get around that you are killing them, but he said this is the quickest, most painless way to do it.

Is letting them die of dehydration worse than letting them die in your stomach?

I like BB's idea of steaming them and saving them for chowder. :)

I think this is a great question, because it highlights how we compartmentalize different interactions we have with animals.

Even Singer might join most people in considering oysters to be "simple"; on the other hand, the physiology of an oyster is recognizable: they breathe, eat, and excrete. They've got a nervous system, a vascular system, and a various sensory systems. They communicate, retreat from noxious stimuli, and mate. They're animals, in other words.

So, sure they feel painful stimuli. What their experience of pain is I can only hazard. Personally, that's enough for me, to decide not to eat them (or any animal). If you want to minimize pain and still eat animals, minimize conditions in which they are alive and experiencing undesired stimuli - dessication, sharp cuts, boiling water.

Flavorpacket,

Absolutely kill them (as quickly as you can) before you chuck them.

L

{rolling his eyes}

Wasting perfectly good food is more unethical than your touchy-feely dilemma. Good god, their death in the garbage couldn't be any less horrid when they are drowning in your gastric juices (because I know dilettantes like you are not actually chewing them).

Shuck them, freeze them on a cookie sheet and bag them when they are firm. You'll reward yourself later with pan-fried oysters later which intensify the complicated flavor of the oyster ten-fold.

please freeze them and use them later!

Dilettante! Fantastic! I've never been called a dilettante through the intertubes before. I think the last time I was so accused was by my high school french teacher (that situation having nothing to do with oysters).

Anyway, I appreciate the comments, particularly with respect to not wasting food. One thing I should clarify is the scale of my operations -- I am not running an industrial scale oyster disposal business out of my apartment. I bought 20 oysters as a surprise for my wife who had just delivered our first baby (and had been craving them during her pregnancy). Of the 5 that remained uneaten, 2 had been resistant to opening. After an unplanned business trip the next day, I returned three days later to confront the situation I described. So, not exactly enough for soup this time and issues of freshness also present.

I think it's nice of you to care, it's an interesting question. The oyster is going to die some day whether you eat it or not, minimizing suffering is the important thing. Can you throw it back into the water? What could live in the East River? Perhaps you could set up an aquarium and keep the survivors as pets and study how long they could live and maybe have one grow a pearl to mark the wonderful occasion of it's purchase. Congratulations on the new baby and I hope your wife still had the craving and enjoyed the thoughtful, romantic gift. I guess eating oysters was too dangerous during the pregnancy? Best regards to all.

Flavorpacket - I wouldn't worry about -- doesn't sound like you are. You had so few, but at least next time you know if you buy more than you are prepared to eat, you can always steam and freeze for later. Just toss them if you haven't already. They won't live in the East River, though this area was once one of the richest, most lush areas for oyster growing. And Kate (NC) while your idea is lovely to grow a pearl, the species of oysters that generate pearls are not the same as the ones that we eat. And GIN, they cannot drown in anyone's gastric juices because as I said in my first post, by the time you put them in your mouth, they are already dead. They do not live once opened and schucked.

I have to tell my husband that someone actually craved oysters during pregnancy. It's quite unusual.

Maybe I'm completely off here but don't you have friends, neighbors, or family that might be able to enjoy 'em?

Throwing away food whether you kill it - throw it away - whatever is waste. Or do like the above mentioned and cook it some other way and freeze it for another day.

bb - how long do they live once they're opened but NOT shucked?

BB, I was joking about the pearl idea, but I did think afterward about the possibility of home oyster farming, either to purify the oysters before eating or for the entertainment of pearl culturing, as some type of educational kit, like the carrot thing I saw on the nursery post. Any biologist who can run with it?

elizabeth in AL - I checked w/my husband about this. He said, once you open the oyster it dies because it's life system is cut off. It's like taking it out of it's skin. So it isn't about the shucking, it's about the opening up.

that's what i would have figured. thought i'd ask though! interesting to know - i'm a seldom meat eater (only fish really) teetering on the verge of vegetarianism - and it's only becuse i don't really like other meat that much...just can't make myself give up sushi. and, yes, i know there is vegetarian sushi...

oh good god, I can't believe people actually treat PETA as a respectable organization worthy of consulting! That's like asking the KKK what they think of immigration... sure they have opinions on it, but it's not very relevant to an honest consideration of the issue.

I don't think pain is simply a question of responding to noxious stimuli and producing avoidance behavior. It's a subjective experience that is based on higher order processing. Avoidance behavior can be produced by many stimuli that do not induce pain, such as unpleasant smells or fear-inducing stimuli, so it's hard to gauge the presence or level of pain solely based on avoidance behavior, unless you know the system quite well already and know that a pain response is involved. Lack of obvious response to pain stimuli doesn't necessarily mean lack of pain either...although this may not be the normal condition, you can imagine someone being paralyzed and unable to generate a motor response to pain, but still able to feel pain. Also, individuals who experience the same noxious stimulus do not all experience identical pain. There is higher order processing that makes the experience of pain a fairly complex phenomenon. In short, it's kind of complicated.

I am not sure what the nervous system of an oyster looks like, but it is not nearly as complex as other molluscs (jellyfish, for instance, have amazingly complex central nervous systems). In the end, as others have said, if you feel comfortable eating the oysters, you probably ought not to feel too worried about just tossing them from the point of view of pain infliction (though not from the point of view of food waste).

What a fabulous question!

angorian, PETA akin to the KKK? I don't agree with PETA's tactics always but I don't think their philosophy is based on hatred. They may not approve of wearing fur, but I don't think most PETA member would lynch a person who wore one.

Drawing an analogy from A:B to C:D does not imply A=C. It implies the relationship of A and B is a similar to the relationship of C and D.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy

I don’t want to offend anyone but I just have to ask; are you serious?

Come on, if you don’t have to think twice about cooking/eating it then why even waste your time worrying about throwing it away? If you’re genuinely concerned about it, boil some water, toss ‘em in and let them cook to death... then toss into the trash.

Or, find someone who likes oysters and give them away.

No matter what you do, they're going to die a pretty shi**y death. :)

As geckotoes1's comment makes clear, an essential part of the question of whether oysters feel pain is what *counts* as pain to begin with. It's fair to say that "response to noxious stimuli" might be insufficient, viewed objectively, to posit that the responder feels pain. And it is certainly a "subjective experience", though that's only important if you think that some animals or people don't have subjectivity (which is another question!). But I can't agree with the suggestion that it relies on "higher order processing". This is used by some to duck the difficult, and unanswered, question of what it is that distinguishes people--or chimpanzees, or dolphins--from oysters. We know there are nervous system differences, we know that the difference has to do with the "complexity" of the nervous system, but since we do not know exactly how that complexity translates into subjective experience, we have to remain agnostic on what the differences in complexity tell us about the oyster or dolphin's experience of the world.

Then if we consider whether an animal feels pain based on how it responds, we might be best served by using the argument from analogy. This is what leads me to believe that other people feel pain *more or less* the way I do, although we might differ on whether a particular stimulus leads to a particular experience of pain. But given that we share physiology, it's a reasonable analogy. Given that we share major elements of physiology with all other animals, I think the analogy should be extended to them, too. This is not of course proof that oysters feel pain, but I'd rather err on the part of conservatism (I lose nothing important by not causing animals pain) than risk causing pain unnecessarily.

The philosopher Alan Carter suggests that pain can be posited in others by virtue of its being an adaptive response to painful stimuli -- with their behaviors (writhing, squealing, or even just moving away quickly) being the only component of that response which we can see, as objective observers.

Something to ponder over lunch. (It is, I presume, moot for the oysters by now.) ...