The first time I ever boiled a live lobster, I was 9. My stepfather stood behind me (unbeknownst to me) and started yelling, as soon as Mr. Lobster hit the water, “Acccck, don’t kill me! I have a wife and kids at home…the agony, the agony!!!” I dropped the poor crustacean, tongs and all into the water and went to run away…ran right into my stepfather, who was laughing his backside off.
This thread made me glad that lobsters aren’t kosher. 
My son wouldn’t eat fish for the first five years of his life because “they were Nemo’s friends”.
I doubt lobsters feel pain, but still, I’m unable to throw one in boiling water. In fact I don’t even want it to be boiled in my presence. Even though I like crustaceans and will hapily eat them.
It reminds me of an anecdote. At the time my then girlfriend and myself were rather short on money. Knowing that I like crustaceans, said girlfriend, as a special treat, bought lobster. I refused to boil them or let her boil them. As a result, a neighbour ended up eating the lobsters (presumably after boiling them). My girlfriend was quite pissed off.
Soy un thermidor
I’m a lobster, baby
So why don’t you kill me?
What’s a thermidor?
It’s how you get into a thermi. 
I absolutely refuse to eat anything that I’m not man enough to kill personally. Of course, since I have about as much killer instinct as a Buddhist baby panda, that excludes anything more lively looking than an onion.
I couldn’t watch a living creature be boiled alive, even if it was hideous.
Nice! I immediately thought of that while clicking on this thread.
I seem to remember that lobsters taste better when killed quickly.
Yes, that was mentioned upthread, but I wonder why.
Do they have metabolic reactions to being boiled slowly that affect their tissue?
If so, are they experiencing a hard death scenario?
We must all know that pain is a very primitive neural function because it directly affects the creature’s ability to avoid danger and death. If so, then I assert the lobster does feel pain. But is it conscious of the pain? This is a fundamental question of cognitive science.
What defines consciousness?
Is a cockroach selfaware?
Most would say no primarily because they don’t have any meaningful interaction with us except to run away from being squashed. It isn’t as if we have caged cockroaches and feed them crusts of bread.
Similarly, how many folks have lobsters as pets? I’ll bet there are some, but very few. They don’t appear to be interactable with humans in any meaningful way.
Curiously, some other aquatic species, notably carp and koy, do appear to react to the presence of their owners and come to the top of the pond not to be fed but just to say ‘Hi’. And relatively few of these animals are eaten.
So, perhaps we will eat creatures that don’t appear to notice that they are dead.
This, of course, ignores the mammals that we kill and eat on a regular (and apparently necessary) basis. I have known cows and pigs who recognized me. Eating those individual creatures would have been difficult. If I were starving, then yes, I would have. I am happy I didn’t have to do so.
I didn’t grow up on a farm, but my grandparents had one and I spent several summers with them there. Very instructive.
‘The procedure was hideous, but I still couldn’t watch.’
Some people kill small animals as a sex kink, not to eat hearty but just to get their rocks off. Human behaviour is fascinating.