A prescription for lobsters?

For most home cooks, lobsters and other shellfish purchased live may be the only creatures we dispatch ourselves prior to cooking. There’s been debate about the best, most humane way to kill lobsters, with many chefs believing a quick knife plunge straight down into the carapace is the best way to do it. Often, people will place the lobster in the freezer prior to killing, either by the above-mentioned knife stroke or by placing the crustacean into a pot of boiling water, the traditional method.

That method, while the most frequently used, has become controversial because we don’t know how, or even if, lobsters feel pain. They often thrash their tails when placed into the boiling water, which indicates a response of some kind. Recently, researchers have been trying to determine if this response is just a reaction to a stimulus or if lobsters indeed feel pain. An experiment conducted at the University of Gothenburg seems to suggest the latter. In the experiment, lobsters were given an electric shock, with and without painkillers, to see how they responded.

The lobsters that were given lidocaine, administered in the water, reacted much less or in some cases, not at all, when given a shock. Those that were given an injection of ibuprofen also reacted less, although they exhibited some stress-related behaviors. It’s unclear whether those behaviors were due to the medication or to the injection itself. In either case, the reduced reactions would indicate that the pain relievers had a similar effect as in humans, indicating that the lobsters may not just be reacting to a stimulus but are in fact experiencing pain.

Until we can find a way to communicate with them, however, it is impossible to determine if the crustaceans process pain in the same way as humans. This experiment does suggest that lobsters experience pain in some form, and that we should find the most humane way to kill them prior to cooking – which does not seem to be dumping them alive into a pot of boiling water.