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The Kindest Way to Kill a Lobster
- hprotagonist 9y ago"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 9y agoCame 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.
- jamesgagan 9y agoTakes 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 9y agoNow 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 9y agoBut 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 9y agoI'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 9y agoHumans were a tasty meal for predators for most of our history. I guess that makes us food too?
- barrkel 9y agoOf course we are. We're just a lot harder to catch these days.
- jaredhansen 9y agoYes, 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 9y agoWhich justifies precisely nothing. Morality is about what you choose to do.
- flukus 9y agoYes, we still are food when we step (or swim) into the wrong environment. Our predators aren't nearly as concerned about our suffering either.
- rosser 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- r00fus 9y agoWhen we're already destroying their habitat (ocean acidification, pollution, warming) it's easy to justify killing them out of mercy.
- spraak 9y ago"You're upbringing from your parents was abusive, so we should just kill you." No.
- QAPereo 9y agoThat sounds distressingly like the logic of killing humans as well... Test: do you want that kind of mercy levied on you?
- Bromskloss 9y agoI'm guessing that the point was, not that it would be beneficial for the individual who gets killed, but that it would save future generations from existence.
- QAPereo 9y agoI don’t know, mercy killing is a hell of a broad license.
- betenoire 9y agoWhen I die, I hope it is in a kind manner. Even though moments later it won't have mattered.
- xupybd 9y agoI don't think so. You are correct that the "kindest" thing to do is to not kill something. But if you've already made the decision to kill something it's kind to pick the least painful method to kill it. For example if someone has been sentenced to death it's kind to do so with a lethal injection, but unkind to do so by crucifixion as the Romans used to love to do. The killing method can't justify the killing but the assumption here is that you've already made your piece with eating the animal. So the only thing left is to try not make is suffer more than required for you to eat it. Nature is generally not so kind. Many predators eat their pray alive, it'd be a rather horrific way to go. I suspect you may not agree with eating animals at all, if so I think that is a separate argument.
- cfontes 9y agoSerious question, how to drown a lobster?
- zachrose 9y agoBubble argon through the water for 1-2 hours, removing all the dissolved oxygen.
- nsxwolf 9y agoWhere does the oxygen go? Argon is inert right? So it’s not binding with it or anything like that?
- sliverstorm 9y agoAnother 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.
- khedoros1 9y agoPresumably, the dissolved oxygen is displaced into the atmosphere.
- kgwgk 9y agoFresh water.
- oh_sigh 9y agoDe-oxygenate the water. In the same manner that you can suffocate a person by removing the oxygen from the air(it's not like the only way to suffocate is in a vacuum).
- phil248 9y agoJust 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 9y agoNature 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"
- hprotagonist 9y agoImplicit assumption: humans aren't natural.
- oh_sigh 9y agoWhy does intelligence come with responsibility?
- goldenkey 9y agoBecause 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 9y agoBut 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.
- amelius 9y agoThe 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 9y agoMicrowaves 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.
- bargl 9y agoTo kill crab my dad uses something like this. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Dewit-Junior-Spade-T-Handle-31-3173/302000113 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Dewit-Junior-Spade-T-Handle-31-3... 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 9y agoThe 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.
- matte_black 9y agoLobsters can live a very long time if not killed. Very long.
- blackflame7000 9y agoIn 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-released-after-20-years-in-captivity/ https://nypost.com/2017/06/16/giant-132-year-old-lobster-rel...
- ryanianian 9y agoThe 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 9y agoDo lobsters have a distributed nervous system?
- ryanianian 9y agoYup. 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.
- justsee 9y agoDavid Foster Wallace's classic piece 'Consider The Lobster' [1] in Gourmet magazine is a fine piece of writing exploring many of these questions in the context of visiting the Maine Lobster festival: Originally published in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet magazine, this review of the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival generated some controversy among the readers of the culinary magazine. The essay is concerned with the ethics of boiling a creature alive in order to enhance the consumer's pleasure, including a discussion of lobster sensory neurons. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150623174527/http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150623174527/http://www.gourme... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Lobster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Lobster
- sushisource 9y agoI 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.
- xupybd 9y agoI 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?
- etiam 9y agoLobsters 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.
- rpenm 9y agoClove 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
- bryanlarsen 9y agoHumanely 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.
- jamesrom 9y agoWhat 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?