Boiling lobsters while they are alive and conscious will be banned as part of a government strategy to improve animal welfare in England.
Government ministers say that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method” for crustaceans and alternative guidance will be published.
The practice is already illegal in Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand. Animal welfare charities say that stunning lobsters with an electric gun or chilling them in cold air or ice before boiling them is more humane.
UK government caring more about lobster welfare than that of trans people.
The bad thing is that these goals do not conflict with each other: they could easily do both if they wanted to.
It’s just silly that this is still a thing in almost 2026. It’s so obvious even Hitler banned it, and he was no animal rights activist.
He actually was, despite his horrific treatment of human beings.
Well, I’ll be damned.
I’ll need to read up on this.
Hitler was a maniac and a despicable person, but I seem to remember reading that he was vegetarian and at least liked dogs. Maybe he was an animal rights activist, provided that you didn’t consider humans animals.
even Hitler banned it
That’s kinda interesting.
What reasoning did that govt. have?
What about crawfish though?
Good.
The amount of people that are in knots trying to defend a barbaric practice is quite telling.
Chopping down plants & eating them is also barbaric.
Yes agreed so lets just starve then, only proper thing to do
Nah, you starve. You’re the one who’s into that stuff.
Just learn to photosynthesize like that guy obviously does
Uh, does anyone in this thread even know how to kill a lobster?
I feel like this is barely a problem, you usually slice into its head and then immediately boil to avoid any chance of rapid bacteria breakdown. I dont even know if theres any other practical method aside from boiling without slicing into the head.
Also not to be that guy, but is this really such a massive concern that the government needs to focus on right now? Seems like they are more concerned about handling lobsters than their own citizens after they labeled Palestine Action a terrorist group and had anyone supporting them arrested and charged as such.
You can have more than one law being established at once.
There has been systematic reduction in the humanities/philosophy, arts, literature etc. In countries. The affect it has is a society focused on work and compliance with status quo. (The USA is actively destroying their own system purposly)
A law ending cruelty should be celebrated as a glimmer of hope that we as a society are still capably of thinking at a higher level, that we are still questioning life, and meanings around it. If we cease to do those things we will be a dead automata society that lives only to work.
focus
How much “focus” does something like this actually require?
Two ways to dispatch a lobster.
One is to put the knife behind the eyes, stab down and chop towards the front of the lobster, bifurcating the head.
The other is to put the lobster in the freezer for 30-45 minutes. This slows its metabolism to the point of practical death, so it doesnt feel anything when you put it in the boiling water.
second option is less…actively choppy, so i imagine most squeemish people would prefer that option.
oof i’d take the head chop over being rapidly frozen and then boiled, thanks
Cause you’re not cold blooded, or a lobster. So you don’t have the same response to it that they do.
Valid point but you cant prove that im not either of those things
It’s about as massive a thing as plastic straws and that annyoing little tab in all caps now.
Also not to be that guy, but is this really such a massive concern that the government needs to focus on right now?
Labour is flailing. They came into office with an enormous popular mandate to undo the corrupt and abusive practices of the Conservative government, then proceeded to extend and cement these same unpopular policies while engaging in all the same corrupt practices - in many cases taking money and gifts from the exact same people.
This is what they’ve got. Haphazardly pandering to any special interest group that won’t step on the toes of a mega-donor or trip over graft being committed by another influential MP.
Seems like they are more concerned about handling lobsters than their own citizens after they labeled Palestine Action a terrorist group and had anyone supporting them arrested and charged as such.
AIPAC fully has its hooks into the Labour government, especially at the leadership level. In many ways, the sanction on boiled lobster and the sanction on Palestine Rights activists is coming from the same place. A need to crank up policing on everyone everywhere for anything that can justify a government sanction.
The UK police state is metasticizing again.
Worked at Red Lobster back in the 90s. The cook would just flip it over, split it down the middle and gut it. 5 seconds, it’s dead as a rock.
Yeah they also do things like that with other animals also, the point of the legislation is we have science showing animals (and fish also after bad science before) feel pain. And we are far enough in history where we can be a kinder species.
i guess the moral question is whether that’s arguably significantly more humane than skipping the severing step. to me it seems possibly unknowable; either way the thing does suffer the slaughter and the question is to what degree. if there’s any culinary or other practical advantage to doing it, and folks believe it’s more humane, why not…
Maybe the citizens have been asking for them to deal with lobbyists and they just misheard
I do think it’d be more humane to not boil lobbyists alive. We can find less grotesque ways to dispatch them.
I for one think it’s highly appropriate
I think boiling is a little too traditional for me. Personally I think the good old fashioned French methods cut just right, you know?
I worked at a country club that would, occasionally, and on the hush hush for VIPS inject them still live, with a syringe of boiling butter, poaching them from the inside out. I believe that is the old fashioned French method
Killed a lobster? I’ve never even tasted one. Sounds like a rich people problem.
Lobsters used to be poor people’s food. The taste is really just giant shrimp.
1800s new England, they were refered to as sea rats, and it was a common clause in servants contracts limiting how many meals a week they could be given lobster.
Honestly not missing much. I don’t get all the fuss, plenty of other seafood that imo tastes loads better.
Ikr. They stopped the lobsters from being slowly boiled alive but not their own citizens lol
Most people don’t cook lobster and those that do cook it once a year.
No, they don’t know how to kill a lobster. They buy it at the store, it sits in the fridge for half a day or two an they toss in in boiling water.
I feel like most people who actually cook live lobsters know what they are doing. Who else buys a live lobster?
Anyone with a few bucks and a grocery store nearby that carries them? I am happy to say that this is pretty rare. As a kid in the 90’s it felt like every grocery store had live lobsters for sale.
Lobsters have a decentralized nervous system, so stabbing it in the head doesn’t really do anything. It’s pretty much just something chefs started doing to appear to know more than the home cook. There’s no scientific reason for stabbing them first.
So then not only are you still boiling them alive, but you are also causing a lot of pain by unnecessarily stabbing their face off?
This is why the correct method is splitting, where you cut the head in half down the middle and partway into the main body. Cutting the head off still leaves a significant chuck of the “brain” alive and unwell.
So, how WOULD you kill it without pain?
Not at all would be fine.
Sure. But, like, is this law pointless? Because unless it bans it altogether (and the comment I replied to is correct about the pain) then it sounds like it’s pointless.
People said freezing. But that just sounds like more psuedo science. Is it science based? Or is it just “people say”.
Freezing just slows them down. A lot of lobsters are caught in the Atlantic around Maine, they can handle your fridge just fine, and your freezer for a painfully long amount of time.
Give them a shot of morphine first
Lol I could see this becoming a delicacy- lobster that gets you high when you eat it
This is how I found out that lobsters don’t have a single centralized brain like humans do.
Lobster as Lemmy mascot when?
The best I know is to freeze them first, not like solid, but just for an hour or so which makes them super lethargic.
You can just put them in the fridge. They don’t need to be in the freezer.
Then drive a knife through their head. Dead before they know what’s happening.
Will always be funny to me that lobsters are such an expensive delicacy at fine dining restaurants when they started out as food for extremely poor people in coastal communities. In the old days the general public viewed eating them as you would view eating a rat today.
While they were called ‘sea rats’,they werent considered quiteas bad as rats- it was common for servant’s contracts to limit the number of meals lobster could be served to them for, usually 1 or 2 a week, not the hard 0 that serving rat would have been.
Lobster is only ok. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything with lobster in it that wasn’t independently good, or improved in any meaningful way with lobster.
That said, when lobster was viewed the way you’re describing, it was seen as more of a pest. There was so much lobster freely available, it was literally piling up on beaches. No one was fishing for lobsters, they were just scooping them up and then making a rather revolting stew with them. That was being served to prisoners as a form of penance, meant to be bland and unstimulating. Sandy guts and all.
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Oysters have made the switch between poor people food and rich people food quite a few times. Tuna has made the switch in my lifetime. It probably has something to do with how easy they are to harvest/catch when plentiful versus the results of overfishing, and how delicate the food is in the supply chain.
There’s a theory that carbonara used to be a “war time” food.
Bacon also, it used to be cheap as fuck. Same with chicken wings. Two of the cheapest parts of the animal, now magically nearly the most expensive.
what are you talking about. bacon and chicken wings are cheap. almost every other desirable cut of pig/chicken is more expensive. chicken wings are often 1-2 dollars a lb.
At my grocery store, pork tenderloin and chicken wings are $6/lb, and pork shoulder or chicken breasts are $3/lb. Bacon starts at $5/lb for the scraps.
where i live chicken breasts are 8 dollars a lb. bacon is like 5 bucks for really nice stuff. chicken wings are 2 bucks. thighs are 6 dollars. pork tenderloin is 9.
Where are you getting wings that cheap? They’re usually like $3-4 a lb in the south and bacon is usually $6+ a lb…only if you grab it in bulk does bacon go down to like $3.50ish and you’re buying the rejection stuff that doesn’t look pretty but still tastes fine.
the grocery store.
Its both here, cooking bacon is the cheapest boneless meat I have ever seen per weight. But you can also get pretty fancy expensive bacon choices too.
Give the tech bros long enough and rat will be a delicacy for the rest of us aswell
It always comes back to demolition man
Not looking forward to the clamshells… maybe lobster claws could be a cheap alternative?
It frightens me that we can’t 100% agree that boiling a living thing that feels pain, is bad.
Humans are the worst.
Most killing involves pain, all meat requires killing.
And it should be instant. Not like the extreme polar end of those asian guys skinning a dog while it was still alive for the meat market.
all meat requires killing.
Technically not true… You could amputate and eat part of an animal without killing it
all plant eating is killing too
Correct. Scientists have done studies on vibrations from plants and they have a reaction to being cut and pulled that could be equated to a “pain” response.
Let’s suppose that you actually genuinely care about reducing the amount of plant suffering in the world. If this is the case, surely you would be vegan, because 3/4 of our total agricultural land is used to grow plants to support animal agriculture. (Since grass feels pain just like soybeans do, this includes pasture land.) So far fewer plants would be killed if everyone was vegan.
Of course, you don’t actually live your life in a manner consistent with believing plants feel pain. I don’t think anyone would think twice about swerving into some flowers to avoid a dog in the street for fear of causing suffering to the flowers.
Have you ever seen felines hunting? They are fucking psychos by your standards.
Judging ourselves by what animals do is a wild take. I guess we’ve just all broadly stopped caring about being human sometime around when “alpha males” became a serious topic of discussion in human behavior.
In case you didn’t know, we are animals.
We should always keep that in mind and stop pretending “being human” is some universal thing.
I’ve heard a lot of the world’s worst people use that as an excuse to do the most horrible things, and I despair that so many people readily embrace it as a validation.
We are animals but we are different than every other animal, and we can be better and do better, and if holding yourself to a higher standard because you were born with sapience is too inconvenient, I’m sure there are some political and ideological groups out there who would love to have you.
LOL so being against your perspective means validating the worst of humanity? Wow! Such arrogance…
We can “do better” from our own perspective. We are “sapient” from our own perspective.
I’m sure there are also a lot of groups of disgusting people you could fit, but how is that relevant? Is it just that you lack arguments and you resort to insulting a person that you don’t know? Is this what you call being “born with sapience”?
What a petty animal you are…
You sound insufferable
😎
I don’t engage with kids trying to troll, get lost.
Stay safe in your bubble.
They get a free pass because they are cute.
Cats are neither human, nor do they boil their kills just because they can. Cats kill, yes. Cats are murderous little fuckers, yes.
However the issue the above poster is talking about isn’t about killing of whatever. Or about eating meat. Their point was about doing it in as humane a way as possible.
Cats are neither human, nor do they boil their kills just because they can.
But, we all know they would if they could.
We don’t boil lobsters just because we can, but because we cook our food.
I said felines by the way, so cats AND all others too.
Have you ever seen lions hunting their prey and eating it from its ass while it is still trying to run away?
Or playing with their prey before eventually strangling it?
That’s their way of doing it, it’s gruesome but it’s fine.
We have our own ways of doing it too, some methods are even considerably more painless than others.
Also you should note your own use of “humane”, that’s a key point there. All this talk is just human specist nonsense.
Last but not least, I could even argue (as a human) that it’s ridiculous to judge what killing method is acceptable (and even what is acceptable to eat) based on things like pain, or having a nervous system.
FUCK YOU AND YOUR SPECIST CRINGE ARGUMENTS! Killing a human, a lobster, a mosquito or a tomato plant is just killing, no matter what lies you tell yourself.
Haha, all those words that I didn’t read…and yet I still know they all amount to “I’m an angry tool”.
Have you ever seen felines hunting?
Devastating scenes. CW: I’m going to eat you little fishy
Yeah. I kinda like meat, but seriously. At least make it quick and/or painless, not torture.
which animal can 100% agree woth you on that? maybe crabs but even then maybe not
pain isn’t bad.
you are projecting your fear of pain onto other animals.
also you are implying animals that kill and ate other animals, are bad. there is no morality outside of human societies
pain isn’t bad.
Pain is universally bad you fucking psycho, all sentient creatures have “experience” of some kind and pain and suffering is a tool meant to make things avoid harm so it’s more than reasonable to assume that other creatures experience it. In fact, you don’t need to assume, we’ve FUCKING STUDIED IT. Have you? have you done ANY research yourself to base this schizoid take on? We are a higher creature with greater awareness and have some measure of responsibility to reduce suffering in the world.
Your argument can be extended to dogs and cats and babies. Which was an actual argument back in the day and they performed surgery on infants without anesthesia because “they didn’t have a concept of pain” according to people who cited vibes and an avoidance of inconvenience.
Yes, and we humans clearly live outside of human societies and thus we shouldn’t hold ourselves to human moral standards.
It’s cute how we set ourselves apart from nature, and use terms like “humane” to mean better, refined, less brutal, yet the moment that notion might even slightly inconvenience us, then we’re just animals.
Humanity? Pfft, fuck that! We’re just animals. We’re like cats, or dolphins!
Imagine how vegans must feel about the world lol
Vegans don’t care about the natural world with regards to suffering caused by the natural world itself. That’s just how things are.
Vegans instead are more interested in suffering caused by humans inflicted on the natural world. This suffering can be more or less wicked than what you’d find out in the wild.
Big distinction.
Pretty poorly, all things considered.
Inb4 plants feel just as much pain, just differently
Yeah but they are masochists and they like it.
Time to chew rocks
In that moral framework ig fruits and veggies would be fine since the plant wants us to eat it
Pretty sure we’re supposed to surgically extract the seeds after anaesthetizing the fruits whilst it’s still on the tree.
You monster!
Honestly that seems pretty reasonable. Boiling things alive is pretty barbaric.
boiled potatoes are barbaric, agree. roasting and frying is the way to go
dumb
From what I’ve been told lobsters will release a toxin if not killed properly. Boiling alive is/was the easiest way to do it and thus widely adopted especially at consumer level.
Quickly in the sense that bacterial growth on them becomes toxic within a far shorter time than other things we eat. Bacteria isn’t growing in the 10 seconds it takes to kill them and then dump into the pot. Just don’t leave them laying around for a long time.
Apparently it’s not easy to kill lobsters. They don’t have a single brain that you can drive a nail through like mammals, AFAIK.
One of the researchers who showed that lobsters feel pain recommended freezing them as the best available method, but maybe it’s better to just stop eating them?
Edit: the article says that electrical stunning works.
Electrical stunning isn’t an option for home chefs. I have heard of chilling but not sure if that is also being banned in the UK or not, given that they would still be alive. And yeah, no idea how reliable someone is going to be in actually killing it and not just rendering it unable to move but still feeling everything.
Even if a perfect knife cut works, how precise do you need to be? The best method would be the one which is pretty easy to do successfully. Also what about other crustaceans?
Nah, they don’t release a toxin, at least not in the sense of “self-defense” that is usually meant with that phrase. After death they rot very quickly, so they do become toxic, I guess that’s similar enough. My dad cooked lobsters often and he always stuck a paring knife in a very specific spot in the head right before boiling, I assume this information is about to become much more widespread to comply with these new laws.
Put them on ice to slow/sleep them, then slice through the center on the head with a sharp knife.
But their feelings!
Does this include if you chill them first, or is that no longer a recommended choice?
Also, is this specifically lobster or other crustaceans
I’m totally unfamiliar with how to cook a lobster, but “chilling them” doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. They live in the North Atlantic, where water temperatures tend to hover in the “refrigerator” range most of the year, and with salinity lowering the freezing point, probably goes even lower over the winter. Seems like chilling a lobster would just make it feel at home.
Chilling them slows their metabolism down as they are cold blooded. Also you get different crustaceans, not all are from the north atlantic. The crabs I caught around the harbour were around
37°c14°c. I presume the ideal temp varies by species.This news is about lobsters, specifically.
But how would it slow their metabolism down? Unless they’re just eating non-stop at room temperature, that colder weather is what they’re adapted to.
So let me get this straight, rather than almost immediately killing them by dropping them in boiling water, instead we’re supposed to slowly freeze them to death first? That’s supposed to be more humane?
Tell us about your lobster knowledge
Since not killing them doesn’t even seem to be an option…
This doesn’t kill the crab
whoa, you mean sentient animals feel pain?? WHAT!?
Nah, the screaming in horror is just air escaping /s
I would hardly call crustaceans sentient, let alone conscious. FFS, they hardly have brains.
Lobsters don’t have vocal cords. Its physically impossible for them to scream.
Ok but that isn’t really the point they were making
That was literally a point they made.
pushes glasses Well akshually… 🤓
So exhausting. I can’t believe we have to explain boiling animals alive is animal cruelty, against a sea of “bugs lol who cares” and joking about inconsequential details. It’s sad
Nigel Farage would know “authoritarian control freakery” when he sees it. I think it’s unsettling for him to see it coming from someone else.
