Boiling lobsters while they are alive and conscious will be banned as part of a government strategy to improve animal welfare in England.
Government ministers say that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method” for crustaceans and alternative guidance will be published.
The practice is already illegal in Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand. Animal welfare charities say that stunning lobsters with an electric gun or chilling them in cold air or ice before boiling them is more humane.
It’s a fucking bug! Boil it and eat the shit already.
I worked at Red Lobster for a number of years as a young’un. A large part of my work in the prep kitchen initially (after I graduated from the dish ring) was to slice live Maine lobs in half to make “princess lobsters” (half a lobster with body cavity stuffed with yummy). These stupid bugs are no more sentient than a cockroach that you smash with a shoe.
Why would anyone spend even a second considering the feelings of a fucking bug?!
The science would tend to disagree with you.
All the evidence points to the fact that lobsters do feel pain in the same way humans do. As they’re being boiled alive they release significant amounts of cortisol, the same as us.
Bug or not, it is sentient. If we are going to insist on eating them then we have a moral responsibility to minimise their suffering before we do.
To be fair they didn’t deny it had feelings, they made it clear they don’t care about their feelings.
There is no living creature, plant or animal, that doesn’t have feedback systems that inform on injury and damage. It may not be in a form that we recognize as pain, but in effect that is what it is.
Nothing lives without affecting the lives of other creatures, but we can do our best to minimize suffering. For lobsters it’s probably ideal to freeze or shock them, as mentioned in the article.
Wouldn’t electrocution be painful too?
Probably. Being electrocuted can range anywhere from insanely painful to death in 0.1 seconds depending on the ampage
Are bugs not sentient? It’s settled: we need welfare laws for bugs. No more pesticides.
What part of “don’t torture an animal to death” is it you struggle with?
You sound like one of those disturbed kids that pull legs off of bugs or slowly crush various body parts until it stops moving.
If you’re gonna kill something, give it a swift death with minimal suffering. It’s really not that complicated.
Lobsters aren’t bugs
So, you don’t care about the suffering of bugs? Seems inconsistent & immoral.
Aww you got me.
Nothing i like more than gathering up an entire ants nest and forcing them to watch as I torture the queen by sticking pins into her.
Then when she finally does croak it, I force the other ants into a battle royale.
When there’s one survivor, I crown him king ant. Then boil him alive and serve him with butter.
Good for you on that. Do you imagine pesticides as mentioned before are humane?
Depends on the method.
I know what you’re trying to do mate.
If it turned out that insects felt pain and we were killing them off in the most brutal way possible for no reason then I wouldn’t be happy about it.
But they don’t, and we aren’t.
Tell me this. Knowing that lobsters feel pain, that there are humane methods of killing them that are quick and don’t involve them slowly being boiled alive and don’t make any fucking difference to what comes next, why exactly are you trying to defend the practice by painting those of us who don’t agree with it out to be hypocrites?
Seriously, do you WANT them to suffer? Or are you just being contrarian for the sake of argument.
You seem awfully sure of that. The jain would disagree with you.
Sentient means ability to perceive or feel. Bugs respond to stimuli, so that includes them.
I doubt all insecticides kill quickly with minimal suffering.
Am I? I’m mostly ridiculing our folly when we’re inconsistent, but also curious if anyone recognizing the impracticalities still has a consistent answer. Ignoring the problem isn’t an answer.
Because you are unless you’re consistent about it. If you have a cool answer to this conundrum, though, I think some of us are eager for it.
It makes little difference to me, so sure, kill lobsters humanely before cooking them. I’m still going to ridicule inconsistent moralizing.
I’d been telling everyone the best answer may be to deliver on the earlier designs of the ancient Mesopotamian gods[1] to exterminate all of humanity. We’d been ruining the planet, and the other species deserve better. No one else takes that idea seriously.
until they settled for limiting human lifespans (to a mere 120 years) & introducing infertility, altogether a bad move ↩︎
The same? That’s a completely unbelievable conclusion to reach. The priorities of some people seems like mental illness to me.
Humans and other mammals release cortisol as part of the pain response.
So do lobsters.
They feel pain when they are boiled alive.
That alone should be enough information for a sane person to think “huh, if they feel pain maybe I should put in a small amount of effort to make sure they don’t suffer when I kill them” instead of trying to justify why it’s ok and use thinly veiled insults aimed at those of us who don’t think animals suffering from avoidable pain is acceptable.
Disregarding the pain of something just because it doesnt have a cute face or fur is far more evidence of mental illness tbh.
The presence of cortisol does not mean that the experience of pain is equitable between humans and lobsters.
It certainly indicates it. It’s certainly a much more plausible explanation than not feeling anything. Fucking strawman argument so thst you can, what, save 2 minutes of your time and not have to kill it humanely?
No, it doesn’t indicate that. It only shows that cortisol is present in both, it doesn’t conclude anything about the subjective experience. You can’t even say ‘pain’ is what the lobster experiences, or what the nature of lobster experience even is. Even humans don’t all feel pain the same way, some even enjoy the experience.
We used to perform surgery on infant humans without anaesthetics because we believed them to be lesser beings incapable of feeling pain. Scientific consensus shifted.
With enough evidence. The presence of cortisol doesn’t prove a lobster’s subjective experience is equitable to humans. Furthermore, that consensus can shift again so even current science isn’t settled, science is never settled.
I suppose I didn’t really express my point. Is it just not better to err on the side of caution? I’m not saying to not eat lobster, people dictating what others should and shouldn’t eat is a massive pet-peeve of mine, but it’s not hard to find alternative prep suggestions that don’t really add much in the way of effort, that’s thought to be more humane.
Personally, I don’t think lobsters experience the world the same way we do. The notion is ridiculous from a physiological standpoint. But it’s equally ridiculous, and reeks of a more or less biblical human exceptionalist perspective, to assume that humans alone possess various traits that are evolutionarily advantageous, like for example the sensation of pain.
And if we’re down to splitting hairs about “well the way other animals feel pain is different” then we’re in purely philosophical territory. Rather akin to “how do I know that the colour I view as green is the same thing you view as green?”
Better how? It’s has zero impact on anything. The lobster dies in seconds and the moment is past. All this effort to satisfy the overactive empathy of a minority of human beings with big, judgemental mouths. Suffering is everywhere and inevitable. Much of it caused by humans. Life is very capable of enduring suffering and it helps shape and grow organisms in important ways. I don’t see suffering as an inherent evil that needs to be eliminated.
Do you waffle about before taking a slipper to the roach that snuck in under your door-jamb? No, you smash that repugnant shit and scoop it up with a piece of junk mail to toss it in the toilet. That sentient bug is just not food to you. The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being.
“The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being”
And I never said it did. I said the fact that it has an observable and measurable pain response makes it a more elevated being.
Lobsters are sentient, the science has proven it. They might be on the lower end but they have also been shown to demonstrate a limited form of memory and intelligence when it comes to things like pain, avoiding objects that are known to cause it.
I get not caring, but mate, you sound like an absolute psychopath who takes delight in killing them.
You are missing the point dude. Boiling alive is slow torture, they are not sa…
Fuck it good luck with your reading comprehension skills
I also don’t waffle about a shoe on a cockroach, in fact I try my best to kill them as fast as possible and in any case will choose a shoe to spray, which takes longer. No point in making anyone or anything squirm in agony over several minutes unless I have a personal vendetta against them.
Sounds like a very quick way to kill it.
I feel the need to point out that the person you’re arguing with is not saying you shouldn’t kill lobsters.
What if they feel every moment? Can’t go out of your way for 2 minutes to potentially reduce the suffering?
We need welfare laws for bugs now. No more pesticides.
Yes, they feel every moment until the knife slices their pea-sized nerve center of a brain in half. That took about 1/2 of a second. It’s done and now we can eat.
Your original comment made it seem as though you were not slicing their pea-brains in half, just boiling them alive (this was cleared up in your follow-up).
Having said that, there may be worse ways to go. In the first season of Shogun they put a guy in a large cauldron of water and slowly brought it up to a boil.
But then I remember that MrBallen story where the guy was pushed into an NYC storm drain and was steamed alive for several minutes in agony. From what I remember, steam isn’t like fire where your nerves are essentially cauterized do you can’t feel anything. You have to suffer through every minute of it.
Let’s just agree to all show each other the courtesy of a knife to the brain.
Lobsters don’t have a centralised brain. Shows just how much you know about lobsters.
No matter how many of them you have killed and cooked, that clearly doesn’t make you a biology expert…
So basically everything you said, can be discarded as an uninformed garbage opinion.
Bro you sound like an absolute psychopath.
If somebody is saying that to you (like right now) perhaps you should reflect on what you’ve said
I’ve worked in restaurants, so I’m used to a certain level of psychopathising among chefs. I don’t know if it’s changed in the last two decades, but in that context I interpreted their comment as being slightly grumpy at being told how to do their jobs.
If they gleefully talked about using the live animal as a sex toy, for example, that would arrive in my brain as an allusion to romantic difficulties.
Just putting that out there. The whole argument looks like cultural differences to me. I don’t think any chef would actually prefer animal cruelty… I did once hear a maître’d joke that cruelty makes food taste better, though.
They prefer animal cruelty in the “I had to do it, so you should too!” kind of way.
Okay, so I have a guy in a chef hat fucking a lobster image in my head. Thanks….
A spoonful of sugar, I always say
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
Because people have gone just as far to the left as those to the right. Meanwhile the rest of us are just trying to live our lives with what little we have yet somehow everything we do to make our living easier is an inconvenience to those on both extremes.
This is a left/right thing?!! WTF? This just a food thing and if you are left/righting it you are a world-class dolt!
They believe compassion and empathy are “woke”
Nah, people that say this (horseshoe theory etc) are exclusively right wing and are grasping at straws to claim we’re just like them.
Which we’re not.
I’d even kill Nazis quickly.
Like lobster.
Who will think about the poor individuals that can only afford lobster and a pot, but not a freezer?