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.
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?