Boiling lobsters while they are alive and conscious will be banned as part of a government strategy to improve animal welfare in England.
Government ministers say that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method” for crustaceans and alternative guidance will be published.
The practice is already illegal in Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand. Animal welfare charities say that stunning lobsters with an electric gun or chilling them in cold air or ice before boiling them is more humane.
From what I’ve been told lobsters will release a toxin if not killed properly. Boiling alive is/was the easiest way to do it and thus widely adopted especially at consumer level.
Quickly in the sense that bacterial growth on them becomes toxic within a far shorter time than other things we eat. Bacteria isn’t growing in the 10 seconds it takes to kill them and then dump into the pot. Just don’t leave them laying around for a long time.
Apparently it’s not easy to kill lobsters. They don’t have a single brain that you can drive a nail through like mammals, AFAIK.
One of the researchers who showed that lobsters feel pain recommended freezing them as the best available method, but maybe it’s better to just stop eating them?
Edit: the article says that electrical stunning works.
Electrical stunning isn’t an option for home chefs. I have heard of chilling but not sure if that is also being banned in the UK or not, given that they would still be alive. And yeah, no idea how reliable someone is going to be in actually killing it and not just rendering it unable to move but still feeling everything.
Even if a perfect knife cut works, how precise do you need to be? The best method would be the one which is pretty easy to do successfully. Also what about other crustaceans?
Nah, they don’t release a toxin, at least not in the sense of “self-defense” that is usually meant with that phrase. After death they rot very quickly, so they do become toxic, I guess that’s similar enough. My dad cooked lobsters often and he always stuck a paring knife in a very specific spot in the head right before boiling, I assume this information is about to become much more widespread to comply with these new laws.
Put them on ice to slow/sleep them, then slice through the center on the head with a sharp knife.
But their feelings!