Recommendations relating to specific commercial practices
Declawing: We have high confidence that declawing (removing one or both of the claws from a crab before returning it back to the water) causes suffering in crabs.
Nicking: We also have high confidence that the practice of nicking (cutting the tendon of a crab’s claw) causes suffering and is a health risk to the animals.
Wholesale and retail: We recommend a ban on the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers.
Stunning: Current evidence indicates that electrical stunning...can induce a seizure-like state in relatively large decapods, and that stunning diminishes, without wholly abolishing, the nervous system’s response to boiling water. We interpret this as evidence that electrical stunning is better than nothing.
Slaughter (decapods) We recommend that the following slaughter methods are banned in all cases in which a more humane slaughter method is available, unless preceded by effective electrical stunning:
- boiling alive,
- slowly raising the temperature of water,
- tailing (separation of the abdomen from the thorax, or separation of the head from the thorax), any other form of live dismemberment,
- and freshwater immersion (osmotic shock).
On current evidence, the most reasonable slaughter methods are double spiking (crabs), whole-body splitting (lobsters), and electrocution using a specialist device on a setting that is designed and validated to kill the animal quickly after initially stunning it.
Slaughter (cephalopods): Various different slaughter methods are currently used on fishing vessels in European waters, including clubbing, slicing the brain, reversing the mantle and asphyxiation in a suspended net bag.
We are not able to recommend any of these methods as humane. On current evidence, there is no slaughter method for cephalopods that is both humane and commercially viable on a large scale.