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.
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.
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.
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
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 (
) 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.