This is a real-life lobster if you never saw one, and it may surprise you to know that
it is green.
They are boiled in large, out of door kettles.
Now they are red.
“Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically
clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot.
Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living
creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience.”
That was the late David Foster Wallace in his 2004 piece for Gourmet Magazine, “Consider
the Lobster,” recounting his experience at the Maine Lobster Festival, one of the
largest such events in the world.
There, and around the globe, lobsters, crabs, and other crustaceans are killed in ways that
most people would consider cruel if done to a pig, chicken, or cow—including boiling
alive, dismembering alive, or even eating them alive.
But should we feel differently about crustaceans,
like these crabs, frantically reaching out for anything to grab onto to avoid going into
the pot?
Or, perhaps more to the point…do crustaceans feel pain?
Boiling alive.
It’s a
fate that even centuries ago was reserved for the worst or at least, more-specific crimes.
In 1531, King Henry VIII made boiling alive THE form of execution for those convicted
of poisoning someone to death.
But after just 16 years, it was repealed by Edward VI (he looks much nicer, that tracks).
Even back then, boiling someone alive just seemed so…extra.
But today, boiling alive and steaming alive, to many, is the accepted method of death for crustaceans like lobsters and
crabs, despite videos like these, in which this lobster is seen thrashing against the
sides of a boiling pot.
This is because some have convinced themselves that crustaceans don’t feel pain like humans
do…or even like pigs, chickens, and cows do.
But is there evidence to support that idea?
My name is Dan Paden and I am Director of Evidence Analysis for PETA.
Dan Paden reviews the hundreds or even thousands of hours of footage that comes in from PETA
investigations, working with law enforcement and the press, to try and get the abuse documented
in those investigations stopped.
In 2013 we had an eye witness work at Linda Beans Maine Lobster which was a lobster and
crab slaughterhouse operated by the LL Bean heiress, so a woman by the name of Linda Bean.
Yep, the same people who brought you those status symbol-solidifying monogrammed backpacks
were also, apparently, in the lobster and crab slaughter business.
Dark!
But, unfortunately, it gets darker.
Lobsters and crabs were literally being torn apart while they were fully conscious.
The lobsters – their claws were ripped off first.
Then they were shoved backwards into, essentially a steel shoehorn.
Their abdomen was separated from their head.
Their head was tossed onto a conveyer belt and sent to the trash.
The rest of their body, while everything is squirming, torn in two and the tail was kept.
And the tail was what was sold, along with the claw meat.
The rest of their bodies were essentially pitched away for trash.
The crabs were also torn apart while still fully conscious.
They were shoved, essentially face first, into a steel spike.
Their top shell was then ripped off, that exposed their – for lack of a better term
– back, essentially.
Which was just tissue and nerves.
And that was shoved up against a rotating stiff bristled brush, and that brush destroyed
and tore off their internal organs.
Then they were pitched onto a belt, taken up a conveyer, and dumped very slowly into
boiling water while they were alive and, again, fully conscious.
That’s pretty overwhelming, especially for the first-ever investigation into a lobster
and crab slaughterhouse.
So, if we take what our eyes—and the workers at the plant—are telling us, it’s clear
that these animals were fully alive when they were torn apart, and even hours later.
But the question then remains—is the writhing and struggling movement you see here a signal
of pain?
Well my name is Bob Elwood.
I am a professor of animal behavior at Queens University in Belfast Northern Ireland.
Dr. Elwood has been studying crustaceans species for decades.
But his study of crustacean pain specifically started after a seemingly innocent run in
at a local pub.
There, waiting for his dinner at a bar, was a famous TV seafood chef.
And so I thought I’d tease him a bit, as is typical in an Irish pub.
And I said that we have a mutual interest in crustacea.
I said, I study their behavior, and you cook them.
And he just looked at me and said, do they feel pain?
And I thought to myself, what a ridiculous question.
But I was polite, and I discussed what kind it was, and how it had functions to the animal
and it was a possibility.
And this got Elwood thinking—just how would someone prove that an animal—any animal
feels pain?
The idea that simply because an animal moves away if you give it what might be a noxious
stimulus is not evidence of pain because pain comprises two aspects.
There is something called nociception.
Nociception is the body’s perception of a potentially painful stimulus that triggers
a reflex response.
Think touching a hot stove and pulling back before you’ve even begun to feel the burn.
But that isn’t the same as actually feeling pain, which makes the study of pain so difficult.
That’s the first difficulty.
I can do lots of things to crabs that will make them run away, and that doesn’t help
me in answering the question.
Not to mention a previous scientific consensus that when crustaceans were writhing about
or scraping against the sides of a boiling, pot, that it was just a reflex, and not actual
pain.
The general feeling in science, before the turn of the century, was these animals act
by reflex response.
There is no need to insert pain.
And I guess when I start here, I thought, that’s probably what world it’s going
to be.
And so he knew that if he was really going to see if crustaceans felt pain, he couldn’t
just rely on a reflex response.
Instead, he looked at two main behaviors.
The first: avoidance learning.
Ellwood discovered that crabs would learn to avoid a negative stimulus after just a
few trials, which was rapid learning.
And I don’t think that can be explained by a reflex response.
And the second, and perhaps more telling, behavior he examined was called a motivational
trade-off.
Elwood found that hermit crabs were less likely to get out of their shell after a negative
stimulus if the shell they had was of good quality, meaning they were trading off the
discomfort with the need to keep a good quality shell.
So, that isn’t a reflex.
If it was a reflex, we would see the same tendency to get out of the shell, irrespective
of the other ecological conditions.
So Elwood couldn’t just chalk up these behaviors to a reflex—pulling the hand away from the
hot stove—because the response to the stimulus was being managed when other factors were
in play.
So the old explanation of the actions of crabs, simply acting by no susceptive reflex, I could
at least say, is not correct.
Elwood published his findings about a year before PETA released its investigation into
Linda Bean’s Maine Lobster, so we asked his opinion.
They are dismembered in some processes without being killed.
Which is, I think that’s wrong.
It’ wrong because – not because I know, or I can say that they experience pain, but
because I can show that they find treatments such as these aversive.
They find tissue damage aversive.
And there is a possibility that they do experience something unpleasant.
And just because there is that possibility, some care should be taken.
That’s a growing sentiment.
An Italian court ruled that lobsters can’t be chilled—a potentially very painful process—before
being killed, and earlier this year Switzerland passed a law banning boiling lobsters alive
entirely, making stunning lobsters before killing them mandatory in the country, the
biggest move to protect crustaceans in human history.
But could that compassion extend to places like Maine or Maryland, where a recent PETA
billboard calling for compassion towards crabs caused an uproar?
You do have to take the fight right to where the animals are suffering the most, and of
course, if you’re talking about crustaceans, the state of Maine is high on that list.
I think consumer attitudes, and certainly laws, lag behind sometimes what scientists
are telling us, what animal behaviorists are telling us about animals.
And that’s certainly the case for crustaceans.
But I think huge progress has been made for these animals.
And I think it’s only a matter of time before Maine and the rest of the United States catches
up to those countries in that regard.
It’s fitting that the same continent that in medieval times was boiling people alive
is leading the way protecting lobsters from the same fate today.
After all, as David Foster Wallace continued in that famous 2004 piece:
“I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so.
I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise
amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival.
The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can
suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman
circus or medieval torture-fest.”
They don’t look like us.
But they sure act like us in important ways, and, leave them off your plate, accordingly.
Tune in next week for another episode of PETA Video Answers, and hit subscribe (and that
all-important bell) to stay up to date on everything happening on PETA’s YouTube channel.
We’ll see you next time.