The Kindest Way to Kill a Lobster | Hacker News Reader

The Kindest Way to Kill a Lobster

bbc.com

38 pointsY_Y72 comments

"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

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.

To kill crab my dad uses something like this. 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.

The verb for this procedure is "pith": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithing

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

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.

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.

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.

David 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.gourme...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Lobster

Do lobsters have a distributed nervous system?

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.

Clove oil works well, according to Dave Arnold: http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=5731.html

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?

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.

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.

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.

Serious question, how to drown a lobster?

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

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

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.

Presumably, the dissolved oxygen is displaced into the atmosphere.

De-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).

Fresh water.

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?

Lobsters can live a very long time if not killed. Very long.

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...

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.

I think your comment is mostly in jest (and it's funny), but...

Most of nature doesn't have a "choice" in its cruelty - eat the thing or die. Humans have a choice most of the time. You can say that you killing X isn't worse than its natural predator doing so, but the reality is that you could survive without killing it and yet you chose eating it over its living.

Personally I'm not pro- or anti-killing of food animals, but reducing the argument to "I'm not worse than nature so I can painfully and slowly kill cows like lions do!" isn't being totally honest about the agency that you have.

IMHO if you're going to decide that you'd like to kill something to eat it, do it in a "respectful" way that doesn't cause more suffering than necessary - doing any less is more or less reckless cruelty (to put it harshly)

I don't think I agree with either of you. :-)

To your parent comment, I would say that, when deciding how I should act, it's irrelevant what previous suffering nature has brought upon people and lobsters. To you, I'd say that it's irrelevant whether nature had other options. Suppose nature did have other, more gentle, options, but chose to incur suffering nonetheless. Would that make it more legitimate for me to cause suffering too?

I think all three of you raise good points and am delighted to see such a thoughtful and civil conversation on hn.

It's not whether nature has other or better options.

It's whether we do.

Good points.

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"

Implicit assumption: humans aren't natural.

Why does intelligence come with responsibility?

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.

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.

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 :-)

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

The thing in question being dead isn't a lasting consequence? Or did you mean besides that?

He is saying that torture is irrelevant if you plan to kill someone. Change the subject from lobster to person. And his argument becomes quite repulsive to most people. Some morals really can't be taught as much as they are obvious to anyone with a full range of emotion. I did respond to his argument anyhow above.

Maybe it's because i don't have a "full range of emotion" but I don't believe there are any absolute moral truths, let alone obvious ones. I think it's very dangerous to assume others don't put the save care and effort into living their lives as well as they can, and if they have come up with a different way of doing that (popular or otherwise) that's it's because they're defective or stupid. I don't necessarily agree with the point your arguing against, but it's not wrong on its face.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Why would the fact that many animals meet an unpleasant but natural demise somehow excuse or otherwise dampen the implications of inflicting suffering or death onto an animal?

I don't generally have qualms about killing animals for food, but "it's okay/less bad because this lobster might have been eaten by something else, or perhaps crushed beneath a rock somewhere" isn't a consideration that would ever play a serious role in my moral calculus of whether or not I should eat a lobster.

Uncountable numbers of humans have met very nasty deaths at the hands of nature and humans over the millennia. What does that have to do with what we do today?

There's a kind of "irresponsible" utilitarianism that says that we should try to minimise suffering, regardless of the cause. In such a framework i think it's fair to point out that there lion's share of lobster suffering occurs elsewhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Which justifies precisely nothing. Morality is about what you choose to do.

Of course we are. We're just a lot harder to catch these days.

Yes, we still are food when we step (or swim) into the wrong environment. Our predators aren't nearly as concerned about our suffering either.

They quite possibly aren't capable of being concerned about it.

We are.

This is just the is-ought problem, or naturalistic fallacy.

That my cat, or any other animal, kills things in order to eat them in no way obligates me to do so.

Since the original question is an is question (specifically, “Given that you want to eat Lobster, what is the method that will get it to your plate with the least amount of suffering”), I’m not sure why you’re trying to turn it into an ought question (about whether we should all be vegetarians)

I'm really not.

The is in this particular thread is what "literally the entirety of the natural world" thinks is "food".

The ought is whether we should "think" likewise, or use our purported rationality to consider the implications of that behavior.

The "naturalistic fallacy" — normally used to deride people we like to think, rightly or otherwise, are less rational than ourselves — is, literally, "if it's natural, it must be good/right/proper." The notion under discussion is exactly that.

It's not about whether or not we should all be vegetarians; it's about fallacious "arguments" that we shouldn't.

Like the delicious peaceful cows out in the pasture.

> deep entrenched conditioned cognitive dissonance

What do you mean by this? Are you talking about Pavlovian conditioning? Also, just to make sure that we are on the same page, my understanding is that _cognitive dissonance_ refers to a discomfort felt when holding views that contradict each other.

I think that their argument relies on assumptions something like these:

- One should avoid causing unnecessary harm to another conscious being

- Many non-human animals are conscious beings

- It is practical to survive on nutrients not derived from the harm of conscious beings

If you accept those three statements, then you should be uncomfortable with the idea of consuming nutrients derived from the harm of something conscious. If you choose to do it anyhow, you'll experience cognitive dissonance (where the definitions of "harm" and "consciousness" remain constant throughout the described scenario).

Thanks for the eloquent explanation, that's what I meant!

https://gizmodo.com/lobsters-were-once-only-fed-to-poor-peop...

That's basically the history of most delicacies.

But the lobster is food. It provides calories and nutrients to the human organism when digested. Lobsters don't un-become food because plants exist.

They become something known as "excesses," you know..things people don't need but they have anyways. Because of evil, greed, or just plain stubbornness?

ie. cake, slavery, child porn, etc.. (although clearly these are not on the same level to anyone except the lobster.)

I 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.

When I die, I hope it is in a kind manner. Even though moments later it won't have mattered.

When we're already destroying their habitat (ocean acidification, pollution, warming) it's easy to justify killing them out of mercy.

"You're upbringing from your parents was abusive, so we should just kill you." No.

That sounds distressingly like the logic of killing humans as well...

Test: do you want that kind of mercy levied on you?

I'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.

I don’t know, mercy killing is a hell of a broad license.

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