CRUEL 'LOBSTER ZONE' MACHINE IS OUSTED FROM RESTAURANT

PETA Letter and Customer Complaints Prompt The Upper Deck to Remove Lobster 'Clawing' Device 

For Immediate Release:
October 14, 2010

Contact:
Amanda Fortino 757-622-7382

Put-in-Bay, Ohio — After hearing from PETA about complaints made by customers, The Upper Deck restaurant has made the compassionate decision to remove the "Lobster Zone" machine from its establishment in Put-in-Bay. The Lobster Zone is a tank that contains live lobsters, and customers pay a fee to manipulate the machine's mechanical claw in an attempt to grab a lobster. 

Animals trapped in Lobster Zone machines typically receive no food and are sometimes injured when they're caught by the claw. After a customer drags a lobster out of the tank, the animal is killed. PETA wrote a letter last month to The Upper Deck citing several experts in marine biology and related sciences who have determined that lobsters feel pain just as mammals do. 

"We're grateful to The Upper Deck management for recognizing that it adds salt to the wound to make game pieces of lobsters before boiling them alive," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "While we hope people will leave all animals off their plates, we are happy that companies now recognize that establishing a compassionate environment makes good business sense."  

According to Dr. Jaren G. Horsley, an invertebrate zoologist, lobsters have a "sophisticated nervous system" and feel "a great deal of pain" when cut or cooked alive. And because lobsters do not enter a state of shock when they are hurt, they feel every moment of their slow, painful deaths when cooked in a pot of boiling water. Dr. Nedim C. Buyukmihci, a professor of veterinary surgery, writes, "There is no question that lobsters have the ability to feel pain and suffer …. [I]t would be inappropriate to do something to lobsters that you would not consider doing to conscious dogs, cats, or humans."  

For more information, please visit PETA.org.