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.
It’s just silly that this is still a thing in almost 2026. It’s so obvious even Hitler banned it, and he was no animal rights activist.
even Hitler banned it
That’s kinda interesting.
What reasoning did that govt. have?Hitler was a maniac and a despicable person, but I seem to remember reading that he was vegetarian and at least liked dogs. Maybe he was an animal rights activist, provided that you didn’t consider humans animals.
provided that you didn’t consider humans animals
And it’s daunting how many people are in a popularised fervour of seeing their misanthropy as a virtue, unwitting of the historical company they keep; unwitting of the totalitarianising psyche they have more than a toe in with that shit. Nor how dangerous and wrong and deluding that is. Horrors, even the worst horrors, propped up with fallacies in service of inverting reality, making atrocities seen as necessary virtues. Especially the animals=good people=bad crowd.
Please stop using "even Hitler … " It just doesn’t work.
He actually was, despite his horrific treatment of human beings.
More formally, on May 15, 1942, the Nazis issued an order instructing all Jews to bring all of their pets to collection points where they would be euthanized.
Of course if animals were in the care of the “wrong” human beings then they had to be killed. Fascist ideology has always, and will always, be an incoherent mess of contradictions in service of bigotry.
PETA expanded on that by declaring all humans to be the wrong kind.
Well, I’ll be damned.
I’ll need to read up on this.
Just leave these animals to live their lives however they seem fit. Without unnecessary human interference. As we do have that option.
Dont know if you’re only referrung to lobsters or all animals but strictly speaking, humans are also animals and letting everyone live life as they see fit is already the default if you will. That includes letting people who want to cook lobsters do that
I guess you missed the human interference part in my previous message. And no, I am generally not okay with people cooking lobsters. Not only is it presently unnecessary for their survival or health, it harms the animal and the part of nature it has been taken out of. All that for a brief moment of joy, something that tastes good. Just leave these animals be, eat something else, with plant-based ingredients that harm the planet way less.
Will always be funny to me that lobsters are such an expensive delicacy at fine dining restaurants when they started out as food for extremely poor people in coastal communities. In the old days the general public viewed eating them as you would view eating a rat today.
Give the tech bros long enough and rat will be a delicacy for the rest of us aswell
It always comes back to demolition man
Not looking forward to the clamshells… maybe lobster claws could be a cheap alternative?
While they were called ‘sea rats’,they werent considered quiteas bad as rats- it was common for servant’s contracts to limit the number of meals lobster could be served to them for, usually 1 or 2 a week, not the hard 0 that serving rat would have been.
Lobster is only ok. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything with lobster in it that wasn’t independently good, or improved in any meaningful way with lobster.
That said, when lobster was viewed the way you’re describing, it was seen as more of a pest. There was so much lobster freely available, it was literally piling up on beaches. No one was fishing for lobsters, they were just scooping them up and then making a rather revolting stew with them. That was being served to prisoners as a form of penance, meant to be bland and unstimulating. Sandy guts and all.
There are several types of lobsters. US Red lobster has nothing to do with the big blue ones they have here in fancy restaurants.
Oysters have made the switch between poor people food and rich people food quite a few times. Tuna has made the switch in my lifetime. It probably has something to do with how easy they are to harvest/catch when plentiful versus the results of overfishing, and how delicate the food is in the supply chain.
Bacon also, it used to be cheap as fuck. Same with chicken wings. Two of the cheapest parts of the animal, now magically nearly the most expensive.
Its both here, cooking bacon is the cheapest boneless meat I have ever seen per weight. But you can also get pretty fancy expensive bacon choices too.
Pork chops are cheaper than bacon.
They aren’t here. At least not the cheapest bacon.
what are you talking about. bacon and chicken wings are cheap. almost every other desirable cut of pig/chicken is more expensive. chicken wings are often 1-2 dollars a lb.
Where are you getting wings that cheap? They’re usually like $3-4 a lb in the south and bacon is usually $6+ a lb…only if you grab it in bulk does bacon go down to like $3.50ish and you’re buying the rejection stuff that doesn’t look pretty but still tastes fine.
the grocery store.
At my grocery store, pork tenderloin and chicken wings are $6/lb, and pork shoulder or chicken breasts are $3/lb. Bacon starts at $5/lb for the scraps.
where i live chicken breasts are 8 dollars a lb. bacon is like 5 bucks for really nice stuff. chicken wings are 2 bucks. thighs are 6 dollars. pork tenderloin is 9.
There’s a theory that carbonara used to be a “war time” food.
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From what I’ve been told lobsters will release a toxin if not killed properly. Boiling alive is/was the easiest way to do it and thus widely adopted especially at consumer level.
Nah, they don’t release a toxin, at least not in the sense of “self-defense” that is usually meant with that phrase. After death they rot very quickly, so they do become toxic, I guess that’s similar enough. My dad cooked lobsters often and he always stuck a paring knife in a very specific spot in the head right before boiling, I assume this information is about to become much more widespread to comply with these new laws.
Put them on ice to slow/sleep them, then slice through the center on the head with a sharp knife.
But their feelings!
Quickly in the sense that bacterial growth on them becomes toxic within a far shorter time than other things we eat. Bacteria isn’t growing in the 10 seconds it takes to kill them and then dump into the pot. Just don’t leave them laying around for a long time.
Apparently it’s not easy to kill lobsters. They don’t have a single brain that you can drive a nail through like mammals, AFAIK.
One of the researchers who showed that lobsters feel pain recommended freezing them as the best available method, but maybe it’s better to just stop eating them?
Edit: the article says that electrical stunning works.
Electrical stunning isn’t an option for home chefs. I have heard of chilling but not sure if that is also being banned in the UK or not, given that they would still be alive. And yeah, no idea how reliable someone is going to be in actually killing it and not just rendering it unable to move but still feeling everything.
Even if a perfect knife cut works, how precise do you need to be? The best method would be the one which is pretty easy to do successfully. Also what about other crustaceans?
Freezing is an interesting method. Humans, being warm blooded, have a hard time in the cold. A lot of cold blooded animals just slow down when they get cold. I’ve no idea how it works for lobsters though, would be interesting to know.
I mean…this should be framed as an attempt at fixing an urban myth: that lobster tastes best when cooked alive.
I worked in restaurants for years and we always killed them quickly and humanely before we boiled them.
To me this is just low hanging fruit.
whoa, you mean sentient animals feel pain?? WHAT!?
Nah, the screaming in horror is just air escaping /s
I would hardly call crustaceans sentient, let alone conscious. FFS, they hardly have brains.
You’re confusing sentience with self-awareness
Lobsters don’t have vocal cords. Its physically impossible for them to scream.
Ok but that isn’t really the point they were making
That was literally a point they made.
pushes glasses Well akshually… 🤓
So exhausting. I can’t believe we have to explain boiling animals alive is animal cruelty, against a sea of “bugs lol who cares” and joking about inconsequential details. It’s sad
It’s a fucking bug! Boil it and eat the shit already.
I worked at Red Lobster for a number of years as a young’un. A large part of my work in the prep kitchen initially (after I graduated from the dish ring) was to slice live Maine lobs in half to make “princess lobsters” (half a lobster with body cavity stuffed with yummy). These stupid bugs are no more sentient than a cockroach that you smash with a shoe.
Why would anyone spend even a second considering the feelings of a fucking bug?!
What if they feel every moment? Can’t go out of your way for 2 minutes to potentially reduce the suffering?
Yes, they feel every moment until the knife slices their pea-sized nerve center of a brain in half. That took about 1/2 of a second. It’s done and now we can eat.
Your original comment made it seem as though you were not slicing their pea-brains in half, just boiling them alive (this was cleared up in your follow-up).
Having said that, there may be worse ways to go. In the first season of Shogun they put a guy in a large cauldron of water and slowly brought it up to a boil.
But then I remember that MrBallen story where the guy was pushed into an NYC storm drain and was steamed alive for several minutes in agony. From what I remember, steam isn’t like fire where your nerves are essentially cauterized do you can’t feel anything. You have to suffer through every minute of it.
Let’s just agree to all show each other the courtesy of a knife to the brain.
Lobsters don’t have a centralised brain. Shows just how much you know about lobsters.
No matter how many of them you have killed and cooked, that clearly doesn’t make you a biology expert…
So basically everything you said, can be discarded as an uninformed garbage opinion.
58 downvotes
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
The science would tend to disagree with you.
All the evidence points to the fact that lobsters do feel pain in the same way humans do. As they’re being boiled alive they release significant amounts of cortisol, the same as us.
Bug or not, it is sentient. If we are going to insist on eating them then we have a moral responsibility to minimise their suffering before we do.
Do you waffle about before taking a slipper to the roach that snuck in under your door-jamb? No, you smash that repugnant shit and scoop it up with a piece of junk mail to toss it in the toilet. That sentient bug is just not food to you. The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being.
You are missing the point dude. Boiling alive is slow torture, they are not sa…
Fuck it good luck with your reading comprehension skills
I also don’t waffle about a shoe on a cockroach, in fact I try my best to kill them as fast as possible and in any case will choose a shoe to spray, which takes longer. No point in making anyone or anything squirm in agony over several minutes unless I have a personal vendetta against them.
“The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being”
And I never said it did. I said the fact that it has an observable and measurable pain response makes it a more elevated being.
Lobsters are sentient, the science has proven it. They might be on the lower end but they have also been shown to demonstrate a limited form of memory and intelligence when it comes to things like pain, avoiding objects that are known to cause it.
I get not caring, but mate, you sound like an absolute psychopath who takes delight in killing them.
No, you smash that repugnant shit
Sounds like a very quick way to kill it.
I feel the need to point out that the person you’re arguing with is not saying you shouldn’t kill lobsters.
The same? That’s a completely unbelievable conclusion to reach. The priorities of some people seems like mental illness to me.
Humans and other mammals release cortisol as part of the pain response.
So do lobsters.
They feel pain when they are boiled alive.
That alone should be enough information for a sane person to think “huh, if they feel pain maybe I should put in a small amount of effort to make sure they don’t suffer when I kill them” instead of trying to justify why it’s ok and use thinly veiled insults aimed at those of us who don’t think animals suffering from avoidable pain is acceptable.
Disregarding the pain of something just because it doesnt have a cute face or fur is far more evidence of mental illness tbh.
The presence of cortisol does not mean that the experience of pain is equitable between humans and lobsters.
It certainly indicates it. It’s certainly a much more plausible explanation than not feeling anything. Fucking strawman argument so thst you can, what, save 2 minutes of your time and not have to kill it humanely?
No, it doesn’t indicate that. It only shows that cortisol is present in both, it doesn’t conclude anything about the subjective experience. You can’t even say ‘pain’ is what the lobster experiences, or what the nature of lobster experience even is. Even humans don’t all feel pain the same way, some even enjoy the experience.
We used to perform surgery on infant humans without anaesthetics because we believed them to be lesser beings incapable of feeling pain. Scientific consensus shifted.
With enough evidence. The presence of cortisol doesn’t prove a lobster’s subjective experience is equitable to humans. Furthermore, that consensus can shift again so even current science isn’t settled, science is never settled.
I suppose I didn’t really express my point. Is it just not better to err on the side of caution? I’m not saying to not eat lobster, people dictating what others should and shouldn’t eat is a massive pet-peeve of mine, but it’s not hard to find alternative prep suggestions that don’t really add much in the way of effort, that’s thought to be more humane.
Personally, I don’t think lobsters experience the world the same way we do. The notion is ridiculous from a physiological standpoint. But it’s equally ridiculous, and reeks of a more or less biblical human exceptionalist perspective, to assume that humans alone possess various traits that are evolutionarily advantageous, like for example the sensation of pain.
And if we’re down to splitting hairs about “well the way other animals feel pain is different” then we’re in purely philosophical territory. Rather akin to “how do I know that the colour I view as green is the same thing you view as green?”
There is no living creature, plant or animal, that doesn’t have feedback systems that inform on injury and damage. It may not be in a form that we recognize as pain, but in effect that is what it is.
Nothing lives without affecting the lives of other creatures, but we can do our best to minimize suffering. For lobsters it’s probably ideal to freeze or shock them, as mentioned in the article.
To be fair they didn’t deny it had feelings, they made it clear they don’t care about their feelings.
Bro you sound like an absolute psychopath.
If somebody is saying that to you (like right now) perhaps you should reflect on what you’ve said
I’ve worked in restaurants, so I’m used to a certain level of psychopathising among chefs. I don’t know if it’s changed in the last two decades, but in that context I interpreted their comment as being slightly grumpy at being told how to do their jobs.
If they gleefully talked about using the live animal as a sex toy, for example, that would arrive in my brain as an allusion to romantic difficulties.
Just putting that out there. The whole argument looks like cultural differences to me. I don’t think any chef would actually prefer animal cruelty… I did once hear a maître’d joke that cruelty makes food taste better, though.
Okay, so I have a guy in a chef hat fucking a lobster image in my head. Thanks….
A spoonful of sugar, I always say
They prefer animal cruelty in the “I had to do it, so you should too!” kind of way.
Because people have gone just as far to the left as those to the right. Meanwhile the rest of us are just trying to live our lives with what little we have yet somehow everything we do to make our living easier is an inconvenience to those on both extremes.
This is a left/right thing?!! WTF? This just a food thing and if you are left/righting it you are a world-class dolt!
They believe compassion and empathy are “woke”
Nah, people that say this (horseshoe theory etc) are exclusively right wing and are grasping at straws to claim we’re just like them.
Which we’re not.
I’d even kill Nazis quickly.
with what little we have
Like lobster.
Who will think about the poor individuals that can only afford lobster and a pot, but not a freezer?
The usual way of dispatching a lobster is a knife straight in the centre of the brain and cutting forward. Not sure why anyone would want a lobster to be alive when its actually cooked.
With this administration’s track record, I’m half expecting this to turn out to be the justification for putting “lobster-verification” cameras in everyone’s kitchen.
“A bobby at every table and a camera in every pot.”
- Liz Truss or something, idk UK politics
Calling the UK Gov the “administration” sounds off.
The proper term for parliamentary systems is just “government”.
Oh, then that.
I didn’t realise they weren’t interchangeable. They feel a lot like administrators.
I didn’t want to be as vague as saying “these twats” to a possibility international audience.
After watching Seaspriacy on Netflix, I stopped eating seafood, with exception to dried seaweed.
Boiling lobsters is barbaric. You should steam them
Nigel Farage would know “authoritarian control freakery” when he sees it. I think it’s unsettling for him to see it coming from someone else.
Man you guys are tackling the real issues.
I like this
Honestly that seems pretty reasonable. Boiling things alive is pretty barbaric.
time to ban Halal slaughter now too!
https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/slaughter/religiousslaughter
I mean… its not really banning Halal slaughter.
Its adding a step to it.
Around 88% of animals slaughtered in the UK for Halal are stunned first. All animals slaughtered under the Shechita (for Kosher) are non-stunned.
Just gotta get that 88% up higher toward 100%, of stunning them (ie, obliterating their frontal lobe, I think?)… and also put that step into play for Kosher slaughter as well.
I feel like chilling them is even worse. They usually live in cold waters, and chilling them in cold air (like a fridge) will just mostly make them suffocate for a while before you boil them alive. They can live a long time out of the water in a cold environment/on ice (think 24 to 48 hours long, not 2 or 3) because it just slows down their biological processes since they’re cold blooded. They’re just going to warm up again as they’re boiling, and it will probably take longer to start boiling as they have to come back up from a lower temperature.
Even the shock method seems kinda useless. It would need to knock them out for about 20 minutes to ensure that they’re unconscious until they’re dead.
The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment, like with a concussive force or stabbing through the brain stem, but that then runs into the issue of how quickly dead lobsters go bad (also the issue of presentation - people don’t want a crushed lobster staring at them from their plate). It’s actually illegal in plenty of places to sell dead lobsters (or even cook them!) due to this, so they would have to be killed on site just before being cooked, which is a tall order when 1lb of lobster meat requires about 5lbs of lobster to make (roughly about a 20% yield on lobsters) and it takes about 5 years for a lobster to reach 1lb in size (and then about 2 years for every pound after that).
All of this said, it’s all still probably more humane than that one company I used to work with back when I was in this kind of industry that was experimenting with getting raw lobster meat out of lobsters by tossing them into a pressure vessel.
Yeah, I don’t really have enough knowledge to offer a solution beyond “if we can’t kill them in a humane way, maybe we just don’t need to eat lobster.”
That was the conclusion I reached a little while ago. So I’ve just stopped eating shellfish as a result.
I’m now trying to reduce the amount of cow I eat.
The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment…
This is a thing.
https://easycleancook.com/how-to-kill-a-lobster-before-you-cook-it/
- The Rapid Destruction of the Central Nervous System
One of the most humane methods of killing a lobster is referred to as the “stabbing method.” This technique involves quickly severing the lobster’s central nervous system, ensuring a fast and painless death.
Procedure (tigger warning/NSFW?)
Prepare the Lobster: Place the lobster on its back on the cutting board. Hold it firmly but gently to stabilize it.
Identify the Right Spot: Locate the cross section of the lobster’s carapace (the hard shell) right behind the eyes. This spot contains nerve ganglia that, when severed, will cause a rapid death.
Make the Cut: Using a sharp chef’s knife, make a swift incision right at the identified spot. Aim for a clean, quick cut to ensure that the nervous system is disrupted immediately.
Confirm the Kill: After cutting, the lobster should not exhibit movement. If it does, wait for a few moments to ensure that the process has been effective.
Basically yeah, as you say, cut its brain stem.
There are chefs who know exactly how to do this, it just requires skill and precision.
This ia arguably the proper way to prepare and serve lobster, as, when done correctly… well, beyond being the most humane method, it also produces the most flavorful dish.
Agreed, and I vaguely remembered something along these lines from my time cooking them, but I also know how many that I was cooking in a day as just a small scale operation at a local fish market cooking and shucking for lobster meat and cooking for the occasional customer to take home with them (I think the most we did in a day was close to one metric ton), and how unfeasible it is to do on a large scale.
I was doing 50 lbs at a time per pot, with 2 large stovetop pots at a time. That’s 25+ lobsters per pot, averaging probably about 60 lobsters per hour that I was cooking by myself. Imagining trying to do that at an industrial scale sounds like the kind of thing that would effectively kill lobster meat as anything other than an expensive specialty item.
And although maybe it should kill mass market lobster meat (why in the hell does McDonald’s sell lobster rolls in the first place???), I also have a visceral gut reaction to the idea of effectively making a food the exclusive domain of the rich. Especially when my boss at that job would make a big stink about people buying fish with Social Security money like poor people don’t deserve to eat anything other than rice and beans.
Well dang, I appreciate the insight from someone who’s actually done it!
But uh… yeah… it really just does seem to be the case that America is run by people who hate poor people, who also become (at least in their own minds) not poor, by creating poor people, who run business models that encourage people to become poor.
Its like a tautological loop of ‘I’m scamming you and that makes me better than you’ as an ethos.
The pathological malignant narcissist society.
boiled potatoes are barbaric, agree. roasting and frying is the way to go
dumb
