I recently read Do lobsters feel pain when put in boiling water? and I don’t know much about much, but I didn’t really understand all that stuff, but my question is,“Do lobsters scream when put in boiling water?”
I was told in biology many years ago that the sound was air trapped inside the lobster escaping through small cracks in the shell. I have never heard it.
Welcome, Major Lee White. Assuming you’re referring to the Staff report by Gfactor entitled do lobsters feel pain when boiled alive, providing a link to the column is helpful to people reading along.
I don’t have a citation handy, but an article in the Washington Post a few years ago described a scientific study that concluded crustaceans not only feel pain, but anticipate it, and are capable of forming expectations about the future.
Lobsters do not have lungs, and so are incapable of screaming. I understand that steam escaping from their shell is supposed to sound like a scream, but I have neither heard it personally nor heard a recording of it.
Having grown up on the New England coast, I’ve seen and heard many a lobster boiled. I’ve never heard any “scream,” either. It might just be a rare 1-in-a-milllion lobster that has enough trapped air to produce a scream. Most lobsters, having gone from ocean to lobster pot to holding tank to holding tank to boiling, never spend much time in air anyway.
Of course, there was the time that the lobster, prior to being put into the pot, started to sing “Under the Sea”… oh, wait, that was a crab.
You shellfish bastard!
Not that I eat lobster anyway, but if I’d heard something that sounded like a reaction to pain upon it being dunked into boiling water, which has to be an absolutely horrific way to go by the way, I wouldn’t care if I knew it was just trapped air escaping, I’d associate it with a scream and, possibly emotionally scarred for life, wouldn’t eat meat from any animal again.
I was just at a place the other day where they had lobsters in a tank ready to be cooked alive and i told my mom that i was glad that i wasnt too fond of that type of seafood anyways because i couldnt imagine eating something that i knew was cooked alive! Awh, i mean, i agree with “Onomatopoeia”… what a terrible way to die. And that’s when my mom assured me that the oysters i like are also cooked alive 
I think im just gonna stick to the mussels!!
Which you realize are cooked alive, right.
David Foster Wallace’s article in Gourmet magazine, “Consider the Lobster” , is required reading. It’s what prompted the Staff report in question.
Thanks for finally mentioning Wallace. I was shaking my head reading this thread and not seeing his name. While I think he does a fine job making a case against the boiling of the lobster, I ultimately don’t buy it. I don’t eat lobster, but I eat cow. Both are killed for my consumption. My question is: What difference does it make how they die as long as the prolonging of death is not willful?
How is choosing to boil them to death rather than quickly dispatching them with a knife through the head not a willful prolonging of their death (and suffering)?
Do they really suffer? I heard they go into shock once they hit the water and die within seconds. But now I’m not so sure…
Whenever I hear a claim like that, my immediate response is “how would we know?” Even assuming you could devise a test for “shock” in a lobster, what are the odds someone’s actually done it? I’ve heard people tell me with a straight face that no animals can feel pain, either because God granted that capability only to humans, or because their brains are too primitive. Neither argument stands up to the “have you ever owned a pet?” test, of course.
But with simpler animals who don’t have obvious ways to express pain that we’d see or hear? The “it can’t feel pain” or “it goes into shock immediately” sorts of statements always seem like exactly the sort of things we’d say to make ourselves feel better about boiling something alive than the result of hard research. Of course there’s no real way to know, but pain is so incredibly useful evolutionarily, I’d bet they feel it quite well.
You can’t just say, “We don’t know.” We can certainly discover, for example, how long it takes for the brain proteins to denature, or when neural activity shuts down.
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
–Jack Handey
Lobsters and lower critters have nervous systems, they have senses, they avoid hazards; it seems odd to me to suggest that such an essential adaptation as pain wouldn’t be a part of that. The fact that lobsters are physically incapable of vocalization (really, what good would that be to them?) implies nothing about the ability to feel pain. Were I to drop a live lobster into boiling water, I’d assume that it hurts like hell, pegging that primitive little nervous system to the red line until the nervous system is damaged to the point where it can’t feel it (which may be the same as “until it’s dead”). I’d also assume that this happens pretty fast in such a small animal, and that lobsters are untroubled by the memory of suffering. And then I’d melt some butter.
It isn’t so much the screaming that bothers me but the profanity that comes out of the blue crabs.