A couple of remarks on consuming these deliciously-tailed fauna. First, immediately followed by crabs, this is the non plus ultra in culinary delights, which is expressed in the price you have to pay. However, the animals have a price to pay as well. I don't think they mind so much being caught and kept alive as long as possible. What I mind is the way they are put to death.
They should be cooked alive. That must hurt - or does it?
There's a well-known story that if you slowly heat water with a frog in it, it will keep sitting there like a dummy waiting to be boiled to death. Supposedly, this is because it lacks the proper apparatus to sense temperature increases. So maybe crabs and lobsters won't feel it either when you drop them in scalding hot water or in live steam? Sadly, it ain't so. The experiments done (according to that always-reliable Wiki; they wisely scratched the artoicle since) to establish this used a temperature increase of 0.002°C per second. However, next thing they tell is that the frog was dead after patiently sitting there, awaiting its death for 2½ hours. What makes this hard to believe - apart from the fact that I've never seen a frog holding still for that long, but what do I know? - maybe it was frozen - is that means a rate of 7°C per hour, so (assuming a starting temp of 10°C) the frog is supposed to have been boiled at 28°C. In later experiments where the temperature went up 10 times as fast, the frogs did try to get out while the going was good.
This proves, for one thing, frogs are smarter than they look! Which isn't hard to do. At all...
While I was just able to sort of believe that, I could not accept that a frog will be boiled to death at 28°C, which makes me keep the entire subject open. However, I do accept that a frog [stoopit as it is - that's the Will of Gott] will try to escape when the heat is on. And so, I accept as well, will a lobster or a crab. If this means they feel actual pain, at this time nobody could say - for all I know.
For me, then, the way out if I want to eat crab or lobster is to kill them in boiling water or, mucho better, in live steam so it's all over ASAP.
The thing has been resolved, finally someone decided to try it. I would have done so myself, but hey, we have precious little frogs around here! Anyway, They Jump Out in Time. Sorry, there was a link but it's dead.
see? a real industry
A story without lamentations about overfishing and depletion of natural resources: Conservation measures of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia lobster fisheries were so successful that end 2008 market prices were tumbling down from CAD7 to CAD4 a pound.
'Funny' Souvenirs: Downright Disgusting These had a good, if unsuccessful, fling at turning off my taste for lobsters forever have your own look at these "funny" things and form your own adult judgment (I double-dast you).
that does it... funny lobsters trying to escape...
yuck yuck yuck... yecch!