I first ran across this metaphor in Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals, but subsequently saw it elsewhere. Recently, an article about anti-elitist rhetoric got me thinking about it. I’m wondering if it’s any truer than the frog-boil metaphor.
Supposedly, you don’t have to put a lid on a pot when you’re boiling live crabs, because if any try to escape, other crabs will pull them down.
It’s a rather striking notion with obvious application to certain social ills, but does this actually happen? Has anyone actually seen crabs behave this way, trapping each other in a boiling death?
The Pratchett reference isn’t accurate. The heroine says that live crabs won’t escape from a bucket because the others will pull them back. It’s used as a metaphor for people trying to rise above their “station”.
If you boil crabs the way you boil lobsters, then I can’t imagine that the crab can escape. You boil the water first, and then toss in the crab. I imagine that the crab loses its ability to do anything pretty fast.
Crabs are, if not actually fully dead, generally incapacitated within a second or two of hitting boiling water - unless the idiom is talking about putting them in a pot of cold water and heating it to boiling (does anyone actually cook crabs this way? I’d think it would overcook them).
If there’s any truth in it, it will be accidental - that is, the other crabs pull down the prospective escapee because they themselves are trying to climb up. One thing I have found is that whereas two crabs in a large bucket will tend to face off and threaten each other constantly, they all calm down and tolerate each other the more crabs you add.
Hmmm. It seems that I added the lurid detail that boiling was going on during all of this in my febrile imagination. I’m glad I asked before going on to spread the meme.
Yeah, you’re mixing it up with the boiling-frog analogy. But yes, crabs in a bucket will pull down any that try to escape, not for any anti-elitist reasons but because once a crab is higher up, it becomes a handy foothold for all the other crabs reaching around for something to grab.
I’ve steamed a few crabs in my time, and they don’t all drop dead quite that quickly. The racket generally lasts for up to a minute. And yes, they do pull each other back down into the pot.
I still put the lid on the pot when I turned my back on it, just in case.
THey didn’t all stay in the bucket prior to steaming, though. Most got pulled back, but not all.
I clean my crabs before boiling. I put them on their backs and lay a bolo knife along their longitudinal axes, then whack it with a mallet. It kills them straight away – unless they push the knife over at the last second. Chopping through what serves as a brain allays any concern about them being boiled alive (not that I have any such concerns). By removing the nasty bits beforehand, there is no risk of contaminants (not that there’s much risk anyway) and I think it makes them taste better. Besides, you can get more crabs in the pot that way.