Lobsters Feel Every Second of You Boiling Them Alive

Beauty is pain. Apparently, so is a gourmet seafood meal. Lobsters, crabs, and other crustaceans experience pain, according to Robert Elwood, an animal behavior researcher at Queens University Belfast.

By Elwood’s findings, crustaceans have drawn the short end of the stick when it comes to how humans treat them. They may not be cute and fluffy like a puppy or majestic like a whale, but if these invertebrates experience pain in the way Elwood argues, there’s no getting around it: Something needs to change. Think of the crabs and lobsters with their claws tied, overcrowded in a tank at your local supermarket, or live prawns impaled on sticks for cooking, or lobsters, having their legs removed while still alive. Or the classic – dropping a lobster in a boiling pot of water for cooking…. (Sam Stryker's full article: Lobsters Feel Every Second of You Boiling Them Alive)

The first thing I think of when I see live lobsters in a grocery store tank is the poor little guys are going to get thrown into a pot of boiling water alive, but really, that’s just the grand finale of their torturous journey. The entire process of capturing, storing, transporting, and cooking lobsters is so graphic, so painful, and so cruel that it cannot possibly be accomplished in a humane fashion—period.

I do feel killing a lobster (or any animal for that matter) is wrong in any circumstance, but at this time, I’m working towards removing the live lobsters from local grocery store chains. Whole Foods moved to eliminate live lobster tanks from their stores in 2006 for ethical reasons. Isn’t it long overdue for other grocery store chains to follow suit?

Please join me in asking Giant Eagle & Kroger to remove live lobster tanks from their grocery store chains.