Since time immemorial, lobsters have been cooked by throwing them alive into boiling water. Now the torture is to be improved by a law.
Lobsters taste delicious, but their preparation often makes cooks and gourmets uncomfortable. The idea of being thrown into boiling water while fully conscious (if lobsters have a consciousness) is, after all, quite cruel, no matter how delicious the end result is. That’s about to change!
The law for lobster protection in Switzerland
In Switzerland, there is now a regulation that dictates how lobsters must be prepared from now on. For the sake of animal welfare, the animals are to be anesthetized before they go into the hot cooking pot. This measure would be possible, for example, with the help of electric shocks. The measure demanded by animal rights activists has now been adopted by the Swiss government and came into force on March 1, 2022.
Experts believe that crayfish have highly developed nervous systems and can therefore feel pain. Anesthesia should therefore save the animals a lot of suffering. In addition, lobsters that are still alive in Switzerland may only be transported refrigerated, not in ice-cold water or on ice. Robert Elwood, zoology professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, for example, told “Der Spiegel”: “I can’t prove that crabs feel pain. But I can say: the way crabs react indicates the existence of a sense of pain. They show all the behavior that one would expect, for example, in a dog that would be maltreated with electric shocks in the same way.”