January 16, 2018
While I joke that lobster is really just an excuse to eat large amounts of drawn butter, I happen to love lobster. Many years ago I began a tradition — that has continued lo these many years — of eating lobster on Independence Day. Two lobsters, actually. Two big, honking lobsters.
And I have frankly always wondered in the back of my mind, as I place them, head-first, into a steaming pot of boiling water, whether they feel pain.
Now, at last the question has been answered. The answer is… Maybe.
According to this article in the New York Times, the Swiss government recently ordered that lobsters not be dropped into boiling water but killed by more humane methods, such as stunning them. The edict was based on research by Robert Elwood, a professor emeritus of animal behavior at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland who, while confessing that he can’t say for sure, insists that “almost everything I looked at came out consistent with the idea of pain in these animals.”
Not everyone is buying that. Says Joseph Ayers, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern University who builds robots modeled on lobster neurobiology, lobsters lack the brain anatomy needed to feel pain. Since they are often swallowed whole by predators, they never needed to evolve to detect pain.
Meanwhile, Michael Tlusty, a lobster biologist at the University of Massachusetts is unsure either way; while he agrees that lobsters lack the brain anatomy that we associate with pain sensation, crustacean brains are so different from ours that no one can say with certainty what (if anything) they are feeling.
Dr. Elwood suggests that lobsters be killed with a Crustastun, a device that delivers an electrical shock to the lobster, killing it more or less instantly. A Crustastun costs $3,400.
Prof. Ayers doesn’t think there is a more humane way of killing a lobster than dropping it headfirst into a pot of boiling water.
Meanwhile, Prof. Tlusty has an alternative strategy: he puts lobsters on ice to slow their nervous systems before they meet the pot.