From The Times, December 22:
Boiling live lobsters to be banned under animal rights reforms
Downing Street has published its welfare strategy, which sets out a series of new farming and food standards and banning trail hunting
Boiling live lobsters and crabs will be banned by ministers under animal rights reforms.
In its animal welfare strategy, published on Monday, the government said that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method”, while also setting out new farming standards and banning trail hunting.
The strategy, which sets out a series of protections for pets, farmed animals and wild animals, said the government would publish guidance on the best way to kill decapod crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters and prawns.
It comes after a new law under the previous Tory government declared the animals were sentient and capable of experiencing pain.
Other methods of dispatching shellfish include electrocution or freezing to stun them before boiling them. Suppliers and restaurateurs warned that electrical stunning devices cost about £3,500.
Robin Hancock, one of the co-founders of Wright Brothers, a leading seafood supplier which has three restaurants in London, said: “With hospitality rather on its knees they do cost over £3,500 per machine. They’re not that small either.
“So I think in summary, of course people care about animal welfare, it’s just the practicalities of it.”
Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, said the UK was “a nation of animal lovers” and claimed the government is “delivering the most ambitious animal welfare strategy in a generation”.....
....MUCH MORE
Today's fun fact: Taking time out from his campaign to abolish slavery, first by abolishing trading in slaves with the Slave Trade Act (1807) followed by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 which banned slavery across the British Empire, a first in world history, William Wilberforce also co-founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, the first and largest animal welfare organization in the world.
Also in Britain, a repost from June 13, 2018:
350 Years Ago Today: Samuel Pepys Forgot His Lobsters
From the now departed The Appendix:
...Thence with mighty content homeward, and in my way at the Stockes did buy a couple of lobsters, and so home to dinner, where I find my wife and father had dined, and were going out to Hales’s to sit there, so Balty and I alone to dinner, and in the middle of my grace, praying for a blessing upon (these his good creatures), my mind fell upon my lobsters: upon which I cried, Odd zooks! and Balty looked upon me like a man at a losse what I meant, thinking at first that I meant only that I had said the grace after meat instead of that before meat. But then I cried, what is become of my lobsters? Whereupon he run out of doors to overtake the coach, but could not, so came back again, and mighty merry at dinner to thinke of my surprize.
- Samuel Pepys, Wednesday, 13 June, 1666.
On an inauspicious Wednesday in 1660[sic], Samuel Pepys left his lobsters in the back of a London taxi. According to his diary, he often purchased lobsters from fish markets in the city and brought them home for dinner. He also ate lobster at the homes of friends, served them at an elaborate dinner party, consumed them in pubs with prawns and ale, and indulged in lobster “with his mistress.” Eating lobster was as much a part of this London bureaucrat’s daily life as singing music with friends, buying a book, or seeing a play.
Of course, Pepys fancied himself an epicurean with great taste in food and drink. He was prone to sing the joys of excess in his gustatory feats. The online Pepys “encyclopedia” gathers his many references to food and drink in an impressive searchable list. But lobsters also lurk in the corners of many other early modern documents: their name is defined in multilingual dictionaries, mentioned in descriptions of Virginia and the East Indies, numbered among delicacies in chronicle accounts of banquets, and cataloged among beasts of sea and land. The lobster’s notable red hue when boiled is used to describe flushed faces. “Lobster” is the favored insult of a surly sea captain in an anonymous play.
For an gourmand like Pepys, lobster was both notable and quotidian. Pepys was able to purchase fresh lobster in London markets because earlier in the century English fishing fleets had adopted the Dutch practice of using “smacks,” or well vessels, to keep fish alive while en route from the sea to the market. It was a meal worth mentioning, like a tasty dish of rabbit or oysters, but a loss to leave such delicious shellfish in a hired coach. The crustacean’s purported effect as an aphrodisiac was its most exotic property and perhaps inspired Pepys to couple lobster and lust on at least one occasion....MORE
The Diary of Samuel Pepys blog has the daily entries; we're now past the 1665 epidemic stage of the plague and coming up on the events of September, 1666.
Here's the complete June 13th entry.
In September 2022 we updated the Pepys collection with: "An Entry From Samuel Pepys Diary, Thursday 28 September 1665"
And one other note on lobsters, from 2024 when greenhouse gas emissions created by powering data centers was a topic of much discussion:
"AMD And Nvidia Will Boil The Oceans"
It has been said that to the lobsters in the kitchens, the sinking of the Titanic seemed like a miracle.
And now, for their progeny generations later it may all prove to have been a cruel hoax....
Which ended with an investment tip:
So, long electricity producers and butter it is.