Nicely sums up some of the main ethical issues of eating sentient creatures, by investigating the case of boiling lobsters alive, which is probably the only time an animal is killed in the actual kitchen/restaurant, and its death is not hidden from plain view. Supposedly many still cling to the myth that lobsters (like the myth about the fish) don't feel pain - something that has been debunked a long time ago, as the process is very painful for lobsters. Nevertheless, you can go to a restaurant, pick out your own lobster from a tank, and have it killed, cooked and served to you "fresh". This reminds me of a scene from the HBO documentary To Love or Kill: Man vs. Animals where the setting is pretty much the same, except that the restaurant guests pick out a cat to eat, instead of a lobster. The cats are kept in cages, the guests pick one, which is then brutally killed in the kitchen, flayed and boiled alive, and served for dinner:
While the cat claws and screeches, the cook hits her several times with an iron bar. Clawing and screeching more now, she is abruptly submerged in a tub of scalding water for about ten seconds. Once removed, and while still alive, the cook skins her, from head to tail, in one swift pull. He then throws the traumatized animal into a large ston vat where (as the camera zooms in) we watch her gulp slowly, with increasing difficulty, her eyes glazed, until – her last breath taken – she drowns. (Tom Regan, Empty Cages, p. 1)
Few people would be ready to face such honest brutality when eating out, although in a way it is a much more honest way to eat your meat - where nothing is hidden, everything shown, there's no pretension of caring treatment or humane killing, and the restaurant guests have nowhere to hide away from the bloody trail of the fleshy menu.
Lobster-boiling also reminds me of a passage from Michael Tobias' thriller-novel Rage and Reason, about an animal rights activist that goes all out in punishing the ones responsible for cruelty towards animals. The ex-Special Forces veteran turns to violent retribution and shows humans no mercy. At one point, he takes his revenge on the lobster industry:
But Jerrasi and his colleagues at the FBI drew their own conclusions, which were augmented later that week when the owner of a restaurant chain specializing in Maine lobsters was found boiled to death in a large cauldron in the kitchen of her establishment. Her skin had turned to the consistency of the rare tats bota, or Brazilian armadillo. Sixty-five live lobsters had been stolen, their whereabouts and state of health unknown. No message had been left. No reason for the murder stated. (Michael Tobias, Rage and Reason, p. 87)
The full audiobook for David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster can be downloaded here.
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