I admit to eating veal; I really like the taste. But if I were to ever give it up it would be because of the horrible screams as they are dropped into the boiling water/broth.
The difference is that oysters and mussels don’t have a central nervous system. Unlike lobsters and most other animals, they can’t feel pain. If there’s an animal that can be eaten without any guilt, it’s the oyster.
Why don’t you go full vegetarian then, if your enjoyment of meat is contingent on going “lalalala can’t hear you.” I’ve killed animals and I’ve heard them scream (e.g. rabbits, these were different occasions. I did it quickly, dogs aren’t so merciful). If they don’t suffer it doesn’t bother me too much, that’s part of eating meat, and would rather see the animal die humanely than herded through it’s own filth in a barn to the killing floor.
It would seem that boiling water would cause quick death, but don’t know any studies on it. How quickly do most sea life die in boiling water (who don’t live near geothermic vents?) Seems like it would be easy to test, even without actually testing on live animals. I don’t know if historical boiling tortures on humans used actual boiling water or lower-than-boiling temperatures.
Some people who feel boiling lobsters is inhuman will use something like an icepick to stab the head first. This sounds like it could potentially be worse; crustaceans don’t have a nice discrete mass of neocortex like humans do. The potential for missing the mark and causing suffering seems high.
Oysters are raw and I think essentially alive when you eat them. Looks like Stentor 2.5 covered why this shouldn’t be a problem, though.
You can avoid the problem completely by putting a spacer at the bottom of the pot and using cold water. Put the lobsters in and let the temperature gradually rise. The warmer water makes them sleepy and they drift off before the heat eventually kills them. It should be a very peaceful death.
If you don’t have a pot that came with a stand to keep things out of direct contact with the bottom, you can use a spaghetti pot with an insert designed to be removed to strain the spaghetti.
It is a sad fact of my life’s conditioning that I love the taste of meat, but I do struggle with it. I could never, however, kill an animal myself, unless of course I had little choice. This is another topic altogether, but an animal posing no threat to me deserves to live as much as I do.
You’d be correct in saying that I’m a hypocrite because although I do eat the flesh of animals, I cringe at the thought of their killing, and shamefully rationalize that since they’ve already been slaughtered, someone’s going to eat them, so why not me. Just typing these words makes me feel slightly queasy, but no, it won’t stop me from eating meat, and I feel badly about that.
You’ll feel differently if you ever get mice coming into your home, deer or rabbits eating everything in your garden or ground hogs digging up your yard.
Actually, I like ground hogs, but most people don’t. As for mice, I take great joy in trapping an killing them since they have no business being in my goddamned basement in the first place.
Wasn’t calling you a hypocrite at all. Most people tend to not know or want to know what happens to make them a burger. I don’t know if I could ever stop eating meat as long as bacon exists, I just think it’s important to realize that yes, an animal dies, but it’s preferable if they lived a happy life before that point.
According to the article in Gourmet magazine, it usually takes 35-45 seconds for the lobsters to die in boiling water. During this time there can often be heard a frantic clanking on the lid and sides of the pot; shortly before some lobsters will cling the pot’s edge before being dunked in. A lobster’s sense of sight and smell is fairly weak, but they have very good touch and temperature receptors: they can migrate a hundred miles to settle upon favored temperature ranges.
Some like to stab the lobster between the eye(stalk)s before cooking. “But the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness.”
Ok, but does stabbing reduce the clanking and banging?
This effect does not occur with frogs, urban myths to the contrary. (Admittedly, some small controversy remains.) The author of the Gourmet article asserts that the analogy lacks foundation anyway, though his claim lacks substantiation and citation.
Actually I wouldn’t. I don’t believe I’ve ever had mice, but if I did and knew about them, I’d probably try to find a way to dispose of them without killing. I have had deer on my property, rummaging through my garbage the night before a pick-up. I simply began holding the bags in my garage overnight and placing it out before leaving for work in the morning; problem solved.
Don’t get me wrong, I can conceive of circumstances that would place me in a position of having to kill an animal, such as imminent threats of bodily harm, but doing so for food, or convenience, are not acceptable reasons for me.
It baffles me to think that people could actually believe for a second that you can dunk a living creature into boiling water and it would feel no pain.
If it turned out that coral were extremely tasty, would you have compunctions about boiling them(it?)? The point is that a strong nervous system that allows sentience (not the scifi term, that’s sapience) does not occur in all animals. The question is whether lobsters have this. Upthread it’s suggested they likely do sense pain, but it still isn’t completely cut and dried.
You assume i care whether you eat boiled lobster or not. I just think that believing they don’t feel anything when you boil them alive is false. You could roast them stick on a stick with a blow torch on the sidewalkfor all I care. Just don’t give me this crap about how living creatures don’t feel pain simply because they cant scream.
Let me ask you this: If you take a fish out of water, it is drowning. It flops and flails and struggles to breathe. just as a drowning human does in water. Can you, with any shred of honesty tell me that a fish out of water suffers less than a human out of air because the human is smarter than the fish? That’s nothing but simple arrogance.
Carrots (although plants) are living creatures. No one (well, almost no one) has ever suggested that they feel pain when boiled. 
Plants are radically different lifeforms. Comparing a carrot to a lobster is absurd. And correct me if I am wrong, but are carrots not dead when you boil them?
Lobsters fight amongst themselves, flee and hide out from predators, and have sufficient sensory information coming in to let them know when they’ve torn loose a piece of food they can then eat. Their eyes, feelers underbellies are exposed, and I would imagine that their exoskeletons result in the heat being absorbed into their bodies more slowly, therefore making for an even more painful death.
And with regard to fish, they’re not only forced to slowly suffocate, but they often get cords run through their gills - which I would imagine is painful - and kept strung up that way for hours.
The intelligence of these creatures can be surprising. I was in a Walmart once and stopped to look in one of their aquariums. A little crab whose body was about the size of a nickel had caught a little neon tetra and was tearing off pieces of its tail fin and eating them. The tetra would struggle and try to get away every time the crab tore off a, ahem, piece of tail. Finally the little fish got free and bolted for the surface to gulp air. (I doubt that it survived because by this time most of its tail fin was gone.)
Then came the surprising part. Another tetra, a little larger than the first, began trying to tip over the crab. It would swim some distance away, get itself positioned, and then swim as fast as it could under the crab to try to flip it over. The crab knew what was up too and was countering the attack by raising itself as high as it could on its legs to let the fish pass by without physically knocking it over, and held its larger claw aloft and open so as to try to catch the fish as it sailed past.
I saw the fish make two passes under the crab before I had to leave so I don’t know how the battle ended, but I imagine the fish won. It was too fast, and even at its small size to large, for the crab ever to be able to catch.
But this little drama told me a hell of a lot about these animals’ intelligence. The fish understood that it needed to flip the crab over to defeat it, it knew how far away it had to get before starting its attack so as to try to knock the crab over without being captured itself, and the crab recognized what was going on and took pains to minimize the effect the oncoming fish would have and positioned itself to try to grab the fish when it came by.
Both of these little animals - a crab the size of a nickel and a fish three-quarters of an inch long - demonstrated in my opinion an amazing knowledge of what was in effect physics, an obvious desire to avoid being harmed themselves, and on the fish’s part an intelligent desire to eliminate a threat. With nervous systems and intelligence like that, there’s no way I’m gonna believe these animals don’t feel pain.
Depends on how old they are, but generally, any carrot you buy in the store, you can plant and it will grow.
BTW, the only reason I posted the previous comment was to get in that video link. 
I am confused about how exactly your first paragraph responds to my post.
I can with a shred of honesty tell you that because you “feel” something suffers does not mean that it does. As far as lobsters or fish go, I might agree with you, but that is based on our understanding of their nervous system. The point is that you can’t arbitrarily assume all living creatures are capable of feeling pain, and base your judgments on a feeling. I doubt but am willing to be convinced that coral or cnidarians feel pain.