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.
With this administration’s track record, I’m half expecting this to turn out to be the justification for putting “lobster-verification” cameras in everyone’s kitchen.
Calling the UK Gov the “administration” sounds off.
The proper term for parliamentary systems is just “government”.
Oh, then that.
I didn’t realise they weren’t interchangeable. They feel a lot like administrators.
I didn’t want to be as vague as saying “these twats” to a possibility international audience.
“A bobby at every table and a camera in every pot.”
- Liz Truss or something, idk UK politics
I mean…this should be framed as an attempt at fixing an urban myth: that lobster tastes best when cooked alive.
I worked in restaurants for years and we always killed them quickly and humanely before we boiled them.
To me this is just low hanging fruit.
Good!
After watching Seaspriacy on Netflix, I stopped eating seafood, with exception to dried seaweed.
I had to tactfully shame my mom for this. Asked if she wanted her end to be quick or slow. She didn’t have the capacity to even think of it cause it’s not a possibility. Some folks just don’t really think about others in certain ways.
I’m all for this but how are they going to enforce it on a consumer level?
LET’S GOOO
The usual way of dispatching a lobster is a knife straight in the centre of the brain and cutting forward. Not sure why anyone would want a lobster to be alive when its actually cooked.
How can I stun mussels before I steam them?
Watching carnists try to discuss animal welfare while their own cognitive dissonance is constantly triggering is creepy as fuck.
i prefer lobsters that were boiled AFTER they become unalive
Lobsters eat each other.
What’s more cruel?
Boiled for 35-45 seconds before death?
Or
Being crushed and dismembered bit by bit, being gnawed on, for many minutes, and possibly even being left in parts, to suffer on for longer yet, after the other lobster had its fill?
When I eat prawns, I often think of this, often putting it context how I’m not doing anything they don’t do to each other, simply meaning they know how tasty they are, and eat each other… but seeing this, makes me realise how much less cruel what I’m doing to them is, than they do to each other.
I’m open to even more humane ways to dispatch them, of course, not resting on any “lesser evil” fallacy, but also, lets not remove this context entirely.
Also, while we’re talking context…
The government in the UK, last decade, committed assault and fraud, dereliction of duty of care, torturing and starving and denying medication, transport, and nearly every human right, to the disabled poor, propagandising against them to drum up hate with more fraud, to cull over 130,000 people in a very slow cruel way. So it’s a little rich to think these tories (no matter if blue, yellow, or red), now “care”. Those who were Killing people over durations often into the months and years of suffering, are now concerned for lobsters suffering for seconds?
Lobsters (probably) don’t understand the concept of other animals feeling pain but we can. Lobsters don’t have any other more merciful methods/tools in their disposal for survival whereas humans do this entirely because “it is more delicious that way”. This is the right context.
Even the comparison “lesser of two evils” is not in the right context because it becomes more evil to the degree that you understand the other side’s suffering.
Good reply.
Though…
whereas humans do this entirely because “it is more delicious that way”. This is the right context.
is that the reason given? That it’s more delicious to boil them alive rather than kill them at their head? If so, what’s the reasoning behind that reasoning? Like… do some more of the tasty juices remain in the lobster if not peircing/smashing their head first? I had imagined it was done that way simply because it was easier (/ safer, like if the claws were not adequately banded shut before taking the knife towards their heads).
Even the comparison “lesser of two evils” is not in the right context because it becomes more evil to the degree that you understand the other side’s suffering.
Agree. To an extent. (At least one) Exception warrants caution, in so far as induced ignorance is used to excuse atrocities. Though then the active point of contention’s merely around the word “evil”, and the many reams that can be written exploring and critiquing it, with or without missing the harms beyond that.
Perhaps “entirely because of taste” is an over statement. It is in reality probably a mixture of freshness and taste, the former being related both to food safety and taste. Nevertheless, living in a world of sea food abundance (and others), if you can not prepare a certain item of food safely without torturing an animal and yet still do it, then you are not doing this for survival but ultimately validating a tortorous means of cooking as a means to reach a certain pleasure. I myself, despite not eating lobsters, lambs, goose liver etc for this very reason, still for instance consume eggs knowing that chicken farms can practice male chick culling where I live. So it is not my intention to point fingers at anyone but just pointing out some observations and some of my inner contradictions on this issue.
I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I’m sure you’ll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log.
As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children.
And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
Lord Vetinari in Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Lobsters only do that when locked in cages with eachother.
Animals tend to have incredibly efficient ways of murdering other animals.
Boiling to death is probably worse than being dismembered too.
True but crustaceans are pretty brutal and there are plenty of animals that don’t wait until their prey is dead to start eating (Coconut crabs tick all those boxes). Boiling to death is defintely fucked up though.
Lobsters only do that when locked in cages with eachother.
Not so. They’ve been observed in the ocean doing that too. Though, I don’t know enough about the particular conditions they need to be in before they start doing that, or stop. Presumably (plausibly, at least, as far as I have seen (~ or at least can remember at least half clearly)), this may only occur while they’re crammed in a crevice, and while they’re still young and soft enough.
Boiling to death is probably worse than being dismembered too.
Wat. How widespread is this perception?
I genuinely do not think people are thinking this thought experiment through…
In being dropped into boiling water, how long before the pain’s so much it triggers the happy endorphins (if that even happens for lobsters as I hear it does for humans), and how long before death and the ordeal is over entirely [someone said 40 seconds, right?] … compared to however many orders of magnitude longer, being eaten alive, having parts of you crushed, and gnawed on, and then other parts, and more… and no guarantee of an end any time soon, and quite plausibly suffering this from tail to head, for the longest time in the ordeal still alive for it… Chances are you may not even die by the claws and gnashers of the one (or several) eating you in that first round, and may go on to suffer, maybe even a fate of starvation eventually killing you. FAR more cruel. Surely. Or does someone have a counter proposal to what it’s like, from how they conceive of the thought experiment?
Anyways, still, better we just “*bosh*” on the head, over in an instant.
And, sorry to say, but, from
Animals tend to have incredibly efficient ways of murdering other animals.
Sounds like you’ve been “Disneyed”. There are many a horrendous animal on animal killings that are FAR from “incredibly efficient”. … Honestly, I do not even want to start reiterating some of the stories. There’s a lot of really gruesome suffering going on that goes not get anywhere near consideration for inclusion in nature documentaries. … But just for a few hints… Bear fights(NSFW:“chunks”,brutal,srsly). Shark bites. Large cats (for some reason) eating their prey from the back end while still alive (~ and they’re said to be among the most efficient apex predators? When even they will simply wear the animal down…). Non predatory animals goring and galling threat risks and leaving them there. All the horrible things that can happen from various insects, spiders, snakes, etc. Komodo Dragons… that’s “efficient”, for the Komodo Dragon… just one bite then waits around for ages for you to die from the horrible parasitic bacteria in their mouth. Okay, I’m going to stop. This goes on and on and on and on. Humans, in media, with advertisers and bosses and careers and audiences and run-times and attention spans etc to consider, tend to depict animals dispatching other animals, biased to the “incredibly efficient” kills. That bias is misleading.
According to a quick search it said the dismembering is a thing which happens in captivity. Maybe sporadically in nature but not common.
You are severely underestimating the pain of heat. Hold your hand above the stove for 0.5 seconds or dip it in hot water very quickly and tell me how nice that was. 40 seconds of that is unbearable. Anything boiling or burning is probably the worst way to go.
Yes, that (
hand above the stove for 0.5 seconds or dip it in hot water very quickly
) would be very painful [and I do have a small burn on my thumb from when I slipped and rested the edge of a hot heavy tawa on it for a couple seconds a few days ago ~ so am quite aware], and far short of the burn euphoria one can toggle into when experiencing burns over (so an LLM tells me when I asked for the % since I didn’t remember) 20% of the body (~ I could have swore it was more, over 60%). But like I think I alluded to somewhere at least once in this conversation, I don’t know if lobsters have a similar flood of endorphins from vast coverage of their body in burns. But it’s plausible. I don’t know how deep in the evolutionary tree that started, or how consistent a convergent evolutionary trait it is. It’s plausible that boiling lobsters could send them off in euphoria. Gets me wondering how this could be tested.
Burns can be biphasic. The dose makes the poison. But like with many a thing studied in toxicology, there may be an upper and lower phase with a middle sweet (or unsweet) spot. Could be that 100% is too much for the endorphins to … catch up.
But again, I don’t even know if lobsters have that at all.
Which one is natural? A lobster fighting another lobster in its natural environment, or a human stuffing them into a pot of boiling water?
Here, let’s meet up and we can test both on you to see which you think is more cruel.
Then you wrap it up with a fat paragraph of whataboutism. You’re dwindeling.
Edit: to the mods removing my comments, they apply to you as well.
I reject the claim that natural is good. Appeal to Nature is a common logical fallacy.
Which one is natural
both. unless you think humans are supernatural.
Humans putting anything alive into a boiling pot of water is not natural. You’re a dillusional nutcase.
so humans aren’t natural?
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Learned cognitive skills are a part of evolution. Monkeys using sharp sticks to spear fish, birds using bread to lure prey, or fishing spitting water to kill insects by your definition is unnatural
Interesting attempt to call out a whataboutism (I’ll check on that in a moment), after making your own appeal-to-nature fallacy, wrapped in red-herring fallacy.
And, strikingly:
Here, let’s meet up and we can test both on you to see which you think is more cruel.
Besides that being a vile proposal, it seems a thought experiment you’ve not thought through.
Okay, lets see where I made a whataboutism…
After some careful consideration… nope. Not a whataboutism fallacy. Was not deflecting. Was showing context to draw even more attention to the matter. Was not an attempt to make one thing seem okay by some other equivalent or worse thing. Was drawing the point of the implausibility that the government are caring for lobsters, given their past actions [Though, can steelman that argument better, if even only just on the face value of “the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing” aspect of big clumsy government, or even (I find incredulous) that this is under a New Labour government, not a Conservative or Conservative&LibDem coalition government]. And I certainly was not at any point trying to make it sound like it’s okay to boil lobsters alive. Sorry for whatever lack of clarity about that which I may have caused by neglectful omission of explicitly stating my position on that. … I do not think it’s right to boil lobsters alive, especially when there are other less cruel means to dispatch them. Though, I do remain open to more scientific scrutiny and reasoning on the matter, and can entertain other possibilities (like, maybe their nerve endings shut off from boiling and they dont actually suffer? And perhaps the knife through the head leaves them in an effective eternal state of suffering felt all over? Or other unknowns.).
If you're as into pastes of fairly lengthy discussions with an LLM to analyse fallacies in interactions as I am, click here
Oh bugger… It’s too lengthy to paste to lemmy. I forgot, this is not diaspora. okies, pasting to a file on my kimsufi… http://ks392457.kimsufi.com/stuff/llmpaste20251224fallacyanalysis it’s only about a thousand lines long. I will add though… despite my efforts to counter the llm sycophancy corruption effect, it’s probably still leaning too lenient and biased.
I’ll break it down for you, since reading comprehension is difficult.
Whatbaoutism does not mean (X is worse, therefore Y is fine)
Whataboutism is also anything that shifts the context of the narrative. As you did by switching it from lobsters to disabled people in the UK. One has nothing to do with the other. You are attempting whataboutism wrapped in a hypocrisy tortilla.
Thank you for also noting that the proposal was vile, so you can agree its a vile act to boil lobsters alive as you finally noted in the end of your response, yes?
Its also nice to see you claim that appeal to nature fallacy, but it is clear you again have no reading comprehension or you would have landed in the ballpark of what I did is called descriptive contrast.
You entirelt deflected because nothing you added was context related to the topic.
You d-e-f-l-e-c-t-e-d
Humans have moral agency. Lobsters have not been proven or shown to have that, therefore we can not judge or dictate what or how a lobster does anything. We can, however, demand ethical scrutiny regardless of their own behavior.
Which one is natural? A lobster fighting another lobster in its natural environment, or a human stuffing them into a pot of boiling water?
Both. Humans are animals, everything we do is natural.
That is completely incorrect. Operating a car is not natural, it is learned and a privilege. Flying a plane is not natural, it is earned, and heavily regulated which is why not everyone can be a pilot.
Even replying on here though a magic rock that somehow converse to any area of the earth, not natural.
You need to open a dictionary and start learning words. I hate to shit on you in a reddit behavior way, but you sound dillusional.
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It was never stated or implied that boiling water is unnatural. You’re putting a notion in that was never there. Feel free to quote me where I said boiling water is unnatural.
A self righteous asshole with better reading comprehension than you have apparently.
So anyways, boiling a living creature —> alive <---- is not a ‘natural’ thing in human nature.
There is some interesting evidence which suggests early humans and related species may have used naturally occurring hot springs to boil food, so it’s not exactly out of the question. It’s not DEFINITIVE by any means, but interesting.
https://www.sci.news/othersciences/anthropology/olduvai-gorge-hot-springs-08858.html
I’m not arguing that humans use boiling water to cook things. My argument is, and stands, that it not natural to take something living, and boil it alive.
That is interesting research though, thanks for the link.
It was never stated or implied that boiling water is unnatural.
Using boiling water to cook food is also natural.
You’re putting a notion in that was never there.
Pardon me going a little off topic, but I can’t get over how bad this sentence is.
better reading comprehension
Work on your writing next.
boiling a living creature —> alive <---- is not a ‘natural’ thing in human nature.
Is ‘natural’ in single quotes because you’re using your own personal definition of ‘natural’?
Looking at every other carnivore on the planet, I’d say that empathizing with our food is less ‘natural’ than killing it painfully.
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That is completely incorrect. Operating a car is not natural, it is learned and a privilege. Flying a plane is not natural, it is earned, and heavily regulated which is why not everyone can be a pilot.
Never heard the “Nothing unnatural exists” perspective asserted?
If doing naive realism (as certainly seems could be the case), that’d be wild to jump from one to the other. :)
Even replying on here though a magic rock that somehow converse to any area of the earth, not natural.
As worth quibbling our way out of tautologies and naive realist definitions of “magic” as for “natural”.
Half tempted to dispell the magic, and elaborate on the physics, chemistry, basics of hardware design, machine code, assembly, the various programming languages and their compilers, network infrastructure, packets, monitors, keyboards, ascii/utf8, font design (and accessibility interfaces), web protocols, federation, etc etc etc etc etc
You need to open a dictionary and start learning words. I hate to shit on you in a reddit behavior way, but you sound dillusional.
Mhmm. Presumptive, arrogant, condescending, ad-hominem flinging… I wonder if there’s some narcissism here, besides the smugnorance born of naive realism and wilful ignorance and lack of curiosity or humility. Could learn so much more, if took that plank out of your eye, rather than chastising others for what you presume in theirs.
Whataboutism
Because humanly killing them with a blade instead of boiling them alive is just too unreasonable!
(/s)
Honestly that seems pretty reasonable. Boiling things alive is pretty barbaric.
time to ban Halal slaughter now too!
https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/slaughter/religiousslaughter
I mean… its not really banning Halal slaughter.
Its adding a step to it.
Around 88% of animals slaughtered in the UK for Halal are stunned first. All animals slaughtered under the Shechita (for Kosher) are non-stunned.
Just gotta get that 88% up higher toward 100%, of stunning them (ie, obliterating their frontal lobe, I think?)… and also put that step into play for Kosher slaughter as well.
I feel like chilling them is even worse. They usually live in cold waters, and chilling them in cold air (like a fridge) will just mostly make them suffocate for a while before you boil them alive. They can live a long time out of the water in a cold environment/on ice (think 24 to 48 hours long, not 2 or 3) because it just slows down their biological processes since they’re cold blooded. They’re just going to warm up again as they’re boiling, and it will probably take longer to start boiling as they have to come back up from a lower temperature.
Even the shock method seems kinda useless. It would need to knock them out for about 20 minutes to ensure that they’re unconscious until they’re dead.
The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment, like with a concussive force or stabbing through the brain stem, but that then runs into the issue of how quickly dead lobsters go bad (also the issue of presentation - people don’t want a crushed lobster staring at them from their plate). It’s actually illegal in plenty of places to sell dead lobsters (or even cook them!) due to this, so they would have to be killed on site just before being cooked, which is a tall order when 1lb of lobster meat requires about 5lbs of lobster to make (roughly about a 20% yield on lobsters) and it takes about 5 years for a lobster to reach 1lb in size (and then about 2 years for every pound after that).
All of this said, it’s all still probably more humane than that one company I used to work with back when I was in this kind of industry that was experimenting with getting raw lobster meat out of lobsters by tossing them into a pressure vessel.
The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment…
This is a thing.
https://easycleancook.com/how-to-kill-a-lobster-before-you-cook-it/
- The Rapid Destruction of the Central Nervous System
One of the most humane methods of killing a lobster is referred to as the “stabbing method.” This technique involves quickly severing the lobster’s central nervous system, ensuring a fast and painless death.
Procedure (tigger warning/NSFW?)
Prepare the Lobster: Place the lobster on its back on the cutting board. Hold it firmly but gently to stabilize it.
Identify the Right Spot: Locate the cross section of the lobster’s carapace (the hard shell) right behind the eyes. This spot contains nerve ganglia that, when severed, will cause a rapid death.
Make the Cut: Using a sharp chef’s knife, make a swift incision right at the identified spot. Aim for a clean, quick cut to ensure that the nervous system is disrupted immediately.
Confirm the Kill: After cutting, the lobster should not exhibit movement. If it does, wait for a few moments to ensure that the process has been effective.
Basically yeah, as you say, cut its brain stem.
There are chefs who know exactly how to do this, it just requires skill and precision.
This ia arguably the proper way to prepare and serve lobster, as, when done correctly… well, beyond being the most humane method, it also produces the most flavorful dish.
Agreed, and I vaguely remembered something along these lines from my time cooking them, but I also know how many that I was cooking in a day as just a small scale operation at a local fish market cooking and shucking for lobster meat and cooking for the occasional customer to take home with them (I think the most we did in a day was close to one metric ton), and how unfeasible it is to do on a large scale.
I was doing 50 lbs at a time per pot, with 2 large stovetop pots at a time. That’s 25+ lobsters per pot, averaging probably about 60 lobsters per hour that I was cooking by myself. Imagining trying to do that at an industrial scale sounds like the kind of thing that would effectively kill lobster meat as anything other than an expensive specialty item.
And although maybe it should kill mass market lobster meat (why in the hell does McDonald’s sell lobster rolls in the first place???), I also have a visceral gut reaction to the idea of effectively making a food the exclusive domain of the rich. Especially when my boss at that job would make a big stink about people buying fish with Social Security money like poor people don’t deserve to eat anything other than rice and beans.
Well dang, I appreciate the insight from someone who’s actually done it!
But uh… yeah… it really just does seem to be the case that America is run by people who hate poor people, who also become (at least in their own minds) not poor, by creating poor people, who run business models that encourage people to become poor.
Its like a tautological loop of ‘I’m scamming you and that makes me better than you’ as an ethos.
The pathological malignant narcissist society.
Yeah, I don’t really have enough knowledge to offer a solution beyond “if we can’t kill them in a humane way, maybe we just don’t need to eat lobster.”
That was the conclusion I reached a little while ago. So I’ve just stopped eating shellfish as a result.
I’m now trying to reduce the amount of cow I eat.
boiled potatoes are barbaric, agree. roasting and frying is the way to go
dumb
Will always be funny to me that lobsters are such an expensive delicacy at fine dining restaurants when they started out as food for extremely poor people in coastal communities. In the old days the general public viewed eating them as you would view eating a rat today.
Oysters have made the switch between poor people food and rich people food quite a few times. Tuna has made the switch in my lifetime. It probably has something to do with how easy they are to harvest/catch when plentiful versus the results of overfishing, and how delicate the food is in the supply chain.
Bacon also, it used to be cheap as fuck. Same with chicken wings. Two of the cheapest parts of the animal, now magically nearly the most expensive.
Its both here, cooking bacon is the cheapest boneless meat I have ever seen per weight. But you can also get pretty fancy expensive bacon choices too.
Pork chops are cheaper than bacon.
They aren’t here. At least not the cheapest bacon.
what are you talking about. bacon and chicken wings are cheap. almost every other desirable cut of pig/chicken is more expensive. chicken wings are often 1-2 dollars a lb.
At my grocery store, pork tenderloin and chicken wings are $6/lb, and pork shoulder or chicken breasts are $3/lb. Bacon starts at $5/lb for the scraps.
where i live chicken breasts are 8 dollars a lb. bacon is like 5 bucks for really nice stuff. chicken wings are 2 bucks. thighs are 6 dollars. pork tenderloin is 9.
Where are you getting wings that cheap? They’re usually like $3-4 a lb in the south and bacon is usually $6+ a lb…only if you grab it in bulk does bacon go down to like $3.50ish and you’re buying the rejection stuff that doesn’t look pretty but still tastes fine.
the grocery store.
There’s a theory that carbonara used to be a “war time” food.
Give the tech bros long enough and rat will be a delicacy for the rest of us aswell
It always comes back to demolition man
Not looking forward to the clamshells… maybe lobster claws could be a cheap alternative?
Lobster is only ok. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything with lobster in it that wasn’t independently good, or improved in any meaningful way with lobster.
That said, when lobster was viewed the way you’re describing, it was seen as more of a pest. There was so much lobster freely available, it was literally piling up on beaches. No one was fishing for lobsters, they were just scooping them up and then making a rather revolting stew with them. That was being served to prisoners as a form of penance, meant to be bland and unstimulating. Sandy guts and all.
There are several types of lobsters. US Red lobster has nothing to do with the big blue ones they have here in fancy restaurants.
While they were called ‘sea rats’,they werent considered quiteas bad as rats- it was common for servant’s contracts to limit the number of meals lobster could be served to them for, usually 1 or 2 a week, not the hard 0 that serving rat would have been.
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UK government caring more about lobster welfare than that of trans people.
Maybe time to start identifying as a lobster…
Is this a poorly executed joke or whataboutism.
It’s the Streisand effect, when an ineffectual government actually does something it becomes a reminder of its failures
Not just “trans people”.
Just people.
Not the only category suffering their cruelty and indifference.
I’ve survived several rounds of the culls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvRz8HrEVKY
No fun being dependent on your abuser trying to include you in their democide.
I don’t think you’re allowed to boil trans people alive either
You certainly shouldn’t be eating them
I mean you can eat them if you know what I mean
I have no idea what you mean. Would you be able to provide some study material for me? Perhaps a research paper?
The bad thing is that these goals do not conflict with each other: they could easily do both if they wanted to.
