Not sure what to make of this. I respect the Japanese and their culture on so many counts – but amphibians are intelligent, and this seems to be excruciatingly cruel. To not be able to identify other living beings as having an inner world of their own, to treat them as mere objects, or even to glorify their macabre treatment does not bring us closer to our own finest nature as humans. Rather, it allows us to start an in-group/out-group (whether that is other humans or other animals) bifurcation that allows us to be ceaselessly violent to anything (notice that they are now things instead of beings) that falls out of the in-group (of ____ like us).
Yes, certainly, there are certain automatic processes of the bullfrog, that once eviscerates keep its muscles twitching even though it is by some counts ‘dead’. But death is a limn rather than an automatic point; and we ought to respect the entire process, not just some arbitrary cut-off point where we decide something is dead, and hence disposable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG2Ms5clbU0