Boiling Point: PETA Fights for Lobsters’ Rights

Not only elephants, but lobsters have excellent memories, recognizing friends from long ago. Females are empowered in their societies, initiating relationships by seeking out males with the best burrows and deciding when to become mothers by carrying live sperm for up to two years until they choose to fertilize their eggs. Lobsters who manage to avoid humans’ traps and pots can live for a century – raising families right up to the end. There’s not a shred of scientific doubt that lobsters suffer and feel pain, as all animals do.

Yet these sensitive individuals are casually tortured in ways that would send the perpetrators to jail if the victims had been born with fur and paws instead of shells and claws. Rockland, Maine, makes a spectacle of their suffering – steaming thousands of lobsters to death every year as part of a “festival.” PETA is suing to stop it – and to show the world why these remarkable animals deserve to be left in peace.

PETA Goes to Court

PETA’s legal case argues that the famous Maine Lobster Festival violates the state law against animal torture and cites overwhelming scientific evidence that lobsters are sentient. That entitles them to protection under Maine law, which requires that sentient animals be killed only by methods causing instantaneous death – facts that the city and festival executives apparently preferred to ignore, just as they tried (unsuccessfully) to ignore our attempts to serve them a summons!

Chilling lobsters before scalding them – a pointless practice promoted on the festival’s website as if it’s something praiseworthy – doesn’t render them unconscious and only prolongs their suffering as they’re slowly cooked alive. Some 16,000 lobsters are illegally tormented and killed at this gruesome event every year.

PETA’s lawsuit also asks the court to declare the festival a public nuisance – since it prevents people from using a city-owned park for two weeks a year without being forced to witness extreme animal suffering.

Hard Shells, Sensitive Souls

The science is absolutely clear: Lobsters and crabs suffer immensely when they’re steamed or boiled to death. Lobsters’ bodies are covered with chemoreceptors, which make them extremely sensitive to their environments and changes in temperature. Unlike humans and other species, lobsters’ nervous systems cannot go into shock, so they feel every second of agony as they’re cooked alive.

At a slaughterhouse for Linda Bean’s Maine Lobster, a PETA investigation revealed that workers tore off live lobsters’ claws and used metal pipes to pry their heads from their bodies. Workers slammed crabs against sharp metal spikes to break off their top shells and violently scrubbed off their exposed internal organs with spinning brushes. That slaughterhouse has closed, but others still operate.

A PETA investigation of Florida’s stone crab industry revealed that workers there also tear off the animals’ claws – causing extreme pain – before throwing the mutilated victims back into the water to bleed out, starve, and die, defenseless. This cruelty is standard – and even mandated – by Florida regulations.

Sea Life, Not Sea Food

Please help lobsters, crabs, and other aquatic animals by leaving them in the sea and off your plate – and to show or tell others why they should do so, too. Delicious vegan seafood options abound, from a whole “lobster” – complete with claws – made from yams to jackfruit “crabcakes.” Check out our list of the latest and greatest options. Asian groceries often carry vegan lobster, and a quick Google search turns up delectable vegan recipes for lobster with butter sauce, bisque, rolls made from hearts of palm and king oyster mushrooms, and more. Even if taste-alikes such as these didn’t exist, there is no moral justification for harming these living, feeling beings.