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.
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.