“After you rip their claws and their tails off … they’ll crawl across the floor and everything.”

Posted by on September 24, 2013 | Permalink

There are things that no sentient animal should ever have to endure – things such as being torn limb from limb while conscious, being slammed face-first onto a spike, being tossed into a bin to die slowly or being boiled alive.

Yet that’s exactly what PETA US discovered is happening to lobsters and crabs at a seafood plant in Maine, USA. Here’s the sickening video footage from the group’s five-month undercover investigation into Linda Bean’s Maine Lobster in Rockland:

The abuse shown in the video is all the more shocking given scientific research that confirms how sensitive crustaceans are to pain. A recent study shows how crabs learn to alter their behaviour to avoid painful stimuli in the same way that other animals do.

Yet despite billions of these animals being caught and killed for food each year, they are rarely protected by even the most basic animal welfare laws. As the study’s author, animal behaviour researcher Robert Elwood, notes, the extreme and painful procedures inflicted by the food industry on lobsters and crabs “would never be allowed with vertebrates”.

Crustaceans may not fit many people’s idea of “cute and cuddly”, but they value their lives just as we value ours and suffer agony when they’re dismembered and boiled alive. Please don’t eat lobsters or crabs – or any other animal.

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