“The Sound Machine” by Roald Dahl is in a short story collection called “Skin”. The collection just came out a few years ago.
What was this thread about again?
Eve! Down, girl! Drop the guy into boiling water. And he’ll scream much louder.
Anyone else flashing on the Night Court episode where the environmentalist frees a tankfull of lobsters at a restaurant?
“One almost made it to a cab.”
That kills me every time.
“What sort of a sick bastard digs up a child’s dead pet rabbit and puts it back in it’s cage?”
That’s the punchline, I’m sure you all know the setup.
Smoother, huh? I’ll say. If I start thinking of lobsters in terms of their being more closely related to vermin than they are to food, my specialite du jour is gonna be macaroni and cheese.
Several years ago, while I was visiting my parents, I noticed the dogs were very interested in something in the yard. When I checked to see what it was, I found a small brown baby rabbit about the size of a hamster. I picked it up to get it away from them and it let out a high-pitched squeal that almost made me drop the damn thing. It didn’t have any injuries so I carried it to the woods on the edge of our property and released it where they couldn’t get to it anymore. It screamed a couple of more times while I was carrying it, but it never made any attempt to get away or bite or put up any resistance at all.
I’ve never heard a lobster make any noise while I was cooking it, but I didn’t really listen very closely to the pot. I’ll make sure to pay more attention next time one hits the water. Anyone want to finance some research for me?
I think I read this story in “The Collected Works of Arthur C. Clarke” a while ago - it might’ve been one of the Tales from the White Hart, as about a third of them are.
Sure, it makes the cooking process smoother. The effect on the eating process can be a bit deleterious, however. On the other hand, think of the lovely images he invoked like Cockroach Newburg or a cockroach/mouse surf & turf combo…
We used to put our bunny on a leash tied to a tree. One day she got all tangled up in the leash and started screaming loudly, almost human-like.
And I mean loud. Think of the shower scene music in “Psycho”.
Up until that moment, she’d never made a sound. Just thumped with her hind legs.
Shook us up a bit. We never put her on the leash like that again.
When I read that, the first thing I thought was ,"That sounds like something from Tales from the White Hart. However, I happen to have it with me at work (I just decided to re-read it) and it is definately not in this collection. I’ll figure it out, though…
Linus, brondicon has already given the correct attrubution for the ”Screaming Trees” short story above:
Complete with link and all. Damn. I have read most of A. C. Clark’s work, and a fair amount of H. G. Wells’, and one single Roald Dahl book, and it had to be Dahl. There ain’t no justice.
The thing that I always found funny about that lobster == roach is that from what I remember of biology class cows are considered closer kin to turtles than lobsters to roaches.(Actually for all I know fish might be more closely related to cows than lobsters to roaches.)
From Pacific Seafood Group website:
They definitely suffer but I guess they lack the basic mechanisms to produce a pain response signal that humans can empathize with.
One is supposed to dunk the lobster in boiling water head first so that the brain is nuked asap so as to minimize the suffering the poor creature has to go through.
I found this page that talks about a way to microwave your lobster that supposedly is more inhumane than the boiled alive approach. They also talk about whether lobsters feel pain or not.
As to freezing the animal to death before boiling: that seems rather sick to me. The advantage seems to be more that they die (horribly) in the freezer but out of view of the person cooking them, rather than thrashing around in the steaming waters of death with their death throes in full display.
Fergus
Mary Tyler Moore got on an anti-lobster-cooking soapbox when I was living in Maine, which for those who may not know, is a very bad place to get onto an anti-lobster-anything soapbox. She ran full page ads urging people to not go to the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland. I think she was asked to leave.
You must be right. When I read the post, I didn’t think it was the same story that I was thinking of, as I didn’t remember reading any collection of Dahl shorts. I assumed that I must have read a similar story by another author. But after reading the synopsis, it sounds exactly like the story that I remember.
Now if I can only remember where I read the story…