
The Kindest Way to Kill a Lobster - Y_Y
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42647341
======
hprotagonist
_" So then here is a question that's all but unavoidable at the World's
Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens all across the U.S.: Is it
all right to boil a creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related
set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What
does "all right" even mean in this context?"_

[http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)

~~~
cpsempek
Came here to post this article. David Foster Wallace's journalism/essays/non-
fiction are some of his best writings IMO. _Consider the Lobster_ is a prime
example. He turns a a request to cover a famous lobster food festival into a
piece simultaneously exploring the biology of lobsters and our relationship
with food both culturally and philosophically. In particular, the ethics of
preparing lobster by boiling alive. It provides a great discussion about the
question OP is trying to answer.

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bargl
To kill crab my dad uses something like this.
[https://www.homedepot.com/p/Dewit-Junior-Spade-T-
Handle-31-3...](https://www.homedepot.com/p/Dewit-Junior-Spade-T-
Handle-31-3173/302000113)

He flips them over and cuts them right down the middle hitting both nerve
receptors almost immediately. I find it to be fairly humane, and boiling live
crab never sat right with us. I doubt this method will be changed in favor of
poking them to death nor do I really think poking them is much (if any) more
humane.

I imagine this could be used on lobster too but we don't catch lobster, so I
don't know.

~~~
hprotagonist
The verb for this procedure is "pith":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithing)

Works with lobsters just fine, and seems like the way to go.

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etiam
Lobsters are long-lived, advanced crustaceans and I welcome treating them as
well as possible under the circumstances. But just from the experiment as
recounted in the post (crabs leave a burrow to avoid electric shocks) I don't
think it's necessarily clear what sort of sensations they are exposed to due
to _the boiling_. I once heard a well-known ethologist (and animal welfare
advocate) argue that since the crustaceans have not evolved with fire and
other extreme temperatures as a common hazard, they don't have the same sort
of sensory responses to it as terrestrial animals. They leave areas with
temperatures which are harmfully high for them, but the experience for them
may be more akin to us seeking shade on a too hot day than us being scalded.
So cooking _may_ actually be a comparatively humane way of killing them. If
better data about the crustacean minds contradicts that, his assessment needs
to be updated, of course, but just from what we see from the BBC I'm not
convinced that is the case.

------
sushisource
I mean, the intent is nice, but writing unenforceable laws is rarely a great
idea. I dunno if the law is specific to commercial kitches or not, but it
should be - probably even then only the food processing plants that they
mention. It's pointless to legislate this sort of thing at the individual
level that you can never ever reasonably enforce.

------
ryanianian
The premise here is that lobsters feel pain, and the article doesn't really
jump through many hoops to prove that. A creature moving away from something
that might kill it (as with the crabs and shock) isn't really evidence for
pain.

If we don't know for sure whether crustaceons feel pain, how can we know if
different methods of killing them are reducing the pain? The article suggests
"stunning the crustacean by chilling it..in an ice slurry". How do we know
that this is not unbearable pain and agony for them?

If lobsters do feel pain, throwing them into a pot of boiling water probably
activates the pain. But offering alternatives that cause "less" pain when we
don't even know if/how much pain is caused by any method could be making the
situation even worse.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Do lobsters have a distributed nervous system?

~~~
ryanianian
Yup. From the article:

> ... This is because crustaceans have decentralised nervous systems, meaning
> that unlike fish, they can't be rendered unconscious with a single blow to
> the head.

------
rpenm
Clove oil works well, according to Dave Arnold:
[http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=5731.html](http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=5731.html)

------
xupybd
I don't understand, is chilling it then cutting it in half really less
distressing than boiling them. Don't they die quicker and suffer less if they
go directly into a boiling pot?

------
bryanlarsen
Humanely killed cows taste better than ones saturated with stress hormones.
Finding a similar effect in lobsters may do more than trying to convince
people to do the right thing.

------
amelius
The best I can come up with: nuke it. That way, there will be no time for pain
signals to travel along its nerves and reach its brain; the nerves will be
gone long before.

~~~
blackflame7000
Microwaves don't kill that fast. The water molecules in the lobster will heat
up and cook it from the inside out until essential proteins are denatured and
the cell stops functioning. Certainly not a quick death, however.

------
cfontes
Serious question, how to drown a lobster?

~~~
zachrose
Bubble argon through the water for 1-2 hours, removing all the dissolved
oxygen.

~~~
nsxwolf
Where does the oxygen go? Argon is inert right? So it’s not binding with it or
anything like that?

~~~
sliverstorm
Another gas bubbling through the water "knocks" the dissolved gasses out of
the water. So the oxygen bubbles up out of the water, along with the argon.

------
jamesrom
What if lobsters do not have the capacity for emotion? What if it felt about
being boiled alive exactly how a potato might? What if a lobster never
suffered?

------
matte_black
Lobsters can live a very long time if not killed. _Very_ long.

~~~
blackflame7000
In fact, there was an article earlier this year about 132-year-old lobster
being released

[https://nypost.com/2017/06/16/giant-132-year-old-lobster-
rel...](https://nypost.com/2017/06/16/giant-132-year-old-lobster-released-
after-20-years-in-captivity/)

------
phil248
Just rest assured that whatever you do to a lobster, nature has done far, far
worse to uncountable trillions of creatures over a few billion years.

~~~
goldenkey
Nature isn't intelligent/sentient as far as we know. Intelligence comes with
responsibility.

To complete your argument:

Many animals eat their children (hamsters for example.)

"Rest assured, if you eat your children, nature has done far worse"

~~~
oh_sigh
Why does intelligence come with responsibility?

~~~
goldenkey
Because it allows one to even consider and understand consequences. Therefore
one becomes "responsible" for the vices they commit-- as hard as they try to
deny and forget their actions. In fact, some people turn themselves in to the
police, or commit suicide as a result of things they've done and feel guilty
about.

~~~
t0mbstone
But one could argue that there don't seem to be any difference in consequences
for anyone involved, regardless of whether or not the lobster feels pain. It
ends up dead and eaten, regardless.

Worrying about whether your food feels pain when you kill it is nothing more
than human imagination and projection. The only lasting consequence is that
you may or may not feel guilty about having caused pain to something that you
have killed.

~~~
goldenkey
People live and die too. What happens between the two points in time is the
subject of a great many stories. Just because something will die does not make
it a worthless endeavor to treat it nicely. This nihilism is a cop out--
everything will die, all planets lost, all protons decayed. If your ultimate
response to that is to live by no code, no ethics, because all marks will be
lost..then be my guest. But be aware the majority of folk will find you to be
in great disdain. And if the laws of probability are of any bearing, you may
find yourself as the bound victim-- you played a side as if it was no
consequence, even advertised openly for it-- and now your team has the knife
in your back. But don't despair, you were going to die anyway! The immense
pain you are about to endure is of no consequence. Just remember the lobster
:-)

~~~
t0mbstone
Perhaps... Or perhaps I choose to not kill and eat animals at all?

------
jamesgagan
Takes a great deal of mental gymnastics to try and convince yourself there's
some "kind" way to take a sentient creature's life. The "kindest" thing to do
would just be to leave them alone.

~~~
drharby
Now you are simply moving goalposts and repivoting the talking point.

It doesnt take any mental gymnastics to think of a solution when you are set
on having butter soaked lobster meat for dinner.

~~~
spraak
But it does take deep entrenched conditioned cognitive dissonance to believe
that a lobster is food when there is a multitude of other more peaceful
choices available.

~~~
phil248
I'd argue otherwise. You'd have to ignore literally the entirety of the
natural world to even begin to think that lobsters are _not_ food.

~~~
cageface
Humans were a tasty meal for predators for most of our history. I guess that
makes us food too?

~~~
jaredhansen
Yes, exactly. And all evidence suggests that lobsters, to the debatable extent
that they're capable of emotions, would be more than happy to eat us were they
large enough to do so.

~~~
rosser
Which justifies precisely nothing. Morality is about what _you_ choose to do.

