Wallace jumps into his assignment, quizzing the rental-car guy, Dick, about lobster sentience on the ride from the airport. Dick explains to Wallace, “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.” Wallace explains, “Besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about 11 different ways, the main reason Dick’s statement is interesting is that its thesis is more or less echoed by the Festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain …”

Wallace looked into the science on lobster pain and reports that lobsters do possess the parts of the brain that feel pain—both nocioceptors, as well as invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters found in our own brains.

Beyond having the parts of the brain necessary, lobsters also have very sensitive pain receptors. Wallace states, “Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. ‘Thus,’ in the words of T.M. Pruden’s industry classic About Lobster, ‘it is that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.’”

If It Looks Like Pain …

And they certainly act as if they are suffering when we “prepare” them (Wallace asks that we “note already the semiconscious euphemism ‘prepared,’ which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens”). He writes, “Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming).”

Lobsters don’t have vocal cords—they use pheromones to communicate. Wallace dispels the myth that lobsters scream when they are boiled alive, saying, “The sound is really vented steam from the layer of seawater between the lobster’s flesh and its carapace …” He notes that “the myth’s very persistent—which might, once again, point to a low-level cultural unease about the boiling thing.”

Cooking live lobsters does not result in a quick and painless death. “According to marine zoologists,” Wallace writes, “it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water.”

He also notes, “However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof.”

Facing the Facts

Lobsters suffer from the minute they are trapped until the last agonizing seconds of their lives. Like other animals used for food, lobsters are torn from their natural habitat and transported long distances. “They come up alive in the traps,” Wallace writes, “are placed in containers of seawater, and can, so long as the water’s aerated and the animals’ claws are pegged or banded to keep them from tearing one another up under the stresses of captivity, survive right up until they’re boiled.”

Wallace confesses that he has “not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system” in which eating lobsters is morally defensible. “[A]fter all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience.”

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