Why do lobsters have to be alive to cook them. It seems so cruel?

Question

Why do lobsters have to be alive to cook them. It seems so cruel?

Answer 1

So is putting a bullet in the skull of a cow.  But it gets done a million times a day.

Answer 2

they dont HAVE to be alive. it's all personal choice. i dont eat lobster/ever cooked it, soooo i dont know. i know you can instantly kill them by cutting their heads in half (cruel) or freezing them numbs them..

Answer 3

Apparently if you kill them in advance, they taste different. So you have to cook them pretty much instantly after they die, which means that you really have to buy them alive. It does seem cruel though, I agree! I'm sure you could at least knock them out RIGHT before you put them in the pot or something, but people are probably just too lazy for that.

Answer 4

Just for interests sake, primitive animals like lobsters with simple nervous systems, are not considered to suffer the way we as humans would if we were plunged into boiling water.

Apparently, what we know as "pain" is partly an intellectual understanding of feeling and that is why we learn to avoid it as we grow from a young child to an adult.

( for example we learn to not touch a hot stove because it hurts).

There are two types of animals, invertebrates and vertebrates," said Craig W. Stevens, professor of pharmacology at the Center for Health Sciences at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa.

Animals without spines, or invertebrates, "have chain ganglia -- groups of neurons connected by nerve fibers," said Stevens.

When stimulated, these chain ganglia cause muscles to contract. "It's a very quick neuron response," Stevens said.

According to Stevens, the chain ganglia network is so simple it doesn't even require a brain. "If you remove the head region of a lobster, the body of the lobster would still react the same way, because of the local reflexes ... involving those chain ganglia," he said.

"When you drop a lobster in boiling water, or put a fishhook through a worm, those stimuli cause those muscles to contract," Stevens said. "We describe that as pain because of the motor response, which is nothing more than neurons that have been stimulated."

So, apparently, they dont really suffer as we imagine they do.

It appears that it is the most commonly understood way to kill and cook a lobster - to cook them alive. However I did some research and there is another way to kill the lobster immediately prior to cooking it:

How to kill a lobster:

Make sure the rubber bands around the claws stay on during this process, as you don't want to be dodging the claws while cutting up the lobster.

You must first cut it in half down the center. This job is one that is best left to a 10 inch chefs' knife, and one with a good deal of heft.

Step 1. With the lobster sitting where the tail curls towards the table, flatten it out and in one hand grasp the tail where it joins the body.

In the other hand, take the knife's point and aim for the place an inch or an inch and a half from between the eyes towards the tail. The blade of the knife should be facing away from your hand that is holding the tail.

Step 2. Press the point of the knife into the head at that point until the point of the knife goes all the way through the lobster's head to the cutting board, then bring the blade down between the eyes to finish the cut of the head.

This kills the lobster as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Answer 5

They don't HAVE to be alive. The trouble with an animal with a tough exoskeleton like a lobster is that there isn't really a quick and easy way to kill it - smashing it over the head or trying to cut its head off would probably cause greater suffering. Dropping it into boiling water kills it quickly, and though I agree that it is rather cruel, it's likely less so than any other method. Remember that it isn't put in cold water and then gradually cooked - it goes straight into boiling water, and is probably dead in a matter of seconds. Though it's commonly believed that lobsters 'scream' when dropped in boiling water, this sound is merely the air trapped in the carapace escaping - it isn't actually screaming in pain.