…because its cruelty to lobsters! They srill sell canned or frozen lobster meat. How the heck did they determine that a large insect feels pain? Anyway, what is nect? Refusal to sell eggs? (A chicken died to provide your breakfast!) :smack:
Um… last I heard, the chicken doesn’t die from the act of laying the egg…
That is pretty weird. Whole Foods is a massive corporation and I am familiar with their inner workings pretty well. I can’t figure it out and they are controlled first in Austin, TX and then by region so I wonder if that affected lots of stores. I don’t see why it would be local but maybe.
Most of the supermarkets here in New England carry live lobsters and you can’t get fresher than that so it wouldn’t be a big deal if ours stopped selling them.
Why do stores sell Maine lobsters, but not Pacific spiny lobsters?
Whole foods won’t sell foie gras either, and has been sued because they forced one of their suppliers to cut ties to a foie gras company, even though the supplier doesn’t even sell foie gras to Whole Foods. Article. I think it’s one thing to say you won’t sell something in your store, it’s yet another thing to say I’m going to make sure you can’t sell it anywhere.
The company line is best represented in Whole Food Markets. This is a link to their website and their news release.
I don’t think they should be allowed to sell foie gras anywhere. I think it should be banned. But I really don’t want to get into a big animal welfare debate; I don’t have the energy. I’ll just drop that in there as my opinion and let it lie.
I’m sure you can find a much cheaper supply of live lobster at just about any other store that’d carry such a thing, anyway. There’s a reason that a common nickname for them is “Whole Paycheck.”
So, they have no qualms about sticking an icepick into a lobster’s brain. Just they want to make sure they’re comfortable all along their journey to their final destiny? Give me a break.
I assume it’s about minimizing pain/cruelty wherever feasible. They do sell other meats, after all, but tend towards more humanely raised versions from what I’ve seen.
I’m a vegetarian, and I eat eggs, but I buy eggs from a local farm where the hens are not packed into tiny cages like most commercial hens, where the male chicks aren’t tossed in a pile then ground into feed (whether alive or dead) for the hens, and where unnecessary antibiotic dosing isn’t practiced. The end result is the same - I’m eating eggs. The intermediate process, however, is where the difference is.
Guess what I killed for dinner last night?
Hey, they were on sale.
They’re lobsters. Fuck 'em. Hell, I used to pull the wings off crawdads when I was a kid and I turned out okay.
Okay, I gotta know what abandoned nuclear waste site you grew up on that had flying crawdads. And could they be trained for covert military operations?
Forget snakes on a plane – you could cut out the middleman with flying crustaceans, and save all those personnel and fuel costs!
Heh. I listened to the story about this on NPR this evening, and at the end heard familiar chords: bum-bum-bum-ba-ba-ba-ba-bum-bum. That made me laugh, knowing that nobody under 35 would likely recognize the wordless goof-the music was the B-52s ‘Rock Lobster’ 
If only a lobster could fly into my pot,
lobster thermidor would hit the spot.
A spotted ocelot they would never sell,
even an arthropod never damned to hell.
Wings on a sea creature rare to tell.
But that flying lobster with harpoon felled.
tastes great on a cracker.
Cracker motherfucker.
I ran out of rhyme.
They didn’t, of course, any more than you know an invertebrate doesn’t feel pain. So they went with the course that wouldn’t cause pain regardless.
Well, duh. Kansas. 
I imagine it’s just pandering to their granola/SUV customer base. I mean, they’re still selling other meat and poultry, and I’m sure those are much more popular products than live lobsters anyway. I think it’s a positive move in itself, but when viewed as part of a holistic effort, fairly meaningless.