Lobster Liberation - Sample Letter to the Editor

Sample Letter to the Editor:

Letters to the Editor
[name of newspaper]

Dear Editor:

If grocery stores kept live pigs or chickens crammed inside tiny glass tanks along with recipes suggesting that the animals be boiled alive, there’d be a lot more vegetarians! But how many of us have walked by supermarket lobster tanks without as much as a second thought?

Take a look the next time you’re at the store: Often, lobster tanks are filthy and overcrowded, with lobsters piled on top of each other, as I witnessed at [name] grocery store this week. Even under the best of circumstances, eating lobsters can be a public health risk. Seafood is the number one cause of food poisoning in the United States, and shellfish are involved in more than 66 percent of all seafood-related illnesses. In fact, as much as 10 percent of raw shellfish are infected with organisms that can cause hepatitis, salmonella poisoning, cholera, and even death. Keeping these sea animals in filthy tanks doesn’t make them any safer!

It is also cruel to confine animals of any species to a small space and slowly starve them. Most lobsters in restaurant and grocery store tanks are never fed in order to prevent the water from being fouled with excrement. Of course, this does nothing to protect consumers from the mercury, DDT, PCB’s, dioxin, disease-causing bacteria, and other contaminants that are commonly found in lobster flesh.

It’s time to liberate these and other animals from the pot by switching to a healthful, humane vegetarian diet.

Sincerely,