FORBID LIVE EELS, CRABS (all kinds) LOBSTERS AND CLAMS TRADE
- by: http://guereiros-da-paz.blogspot.com
- recipient: FAO: animal welfare, AsPCA, European union: animal welfare
Your Excellency:
The controversy about keeping lobsters idling for months in tanks in supermarkets or restaurants goes claw in claw with the debate about the appropriate way to kill the creature should you decide to eat one.
While some argue that the only humane way to kill a lobster is to cleave its head with a large sharp knife, cookbooks and culinary texts have traditionally suggested plunging the animal into a pan of rapidly boiling water. Some have instead suggested bringing the pan of water to the boil with the lobster in it, so that it gets knocked out slowly but does not - so the theory goes - feel any pain.
This is all fine in theory. But as anyone who has ever tried to cook a lobster by plunging it into boiling water knows, the lobster rarely co-operates. Rather than sitting and dying quietly, the lobster will thrash about and hook its claws over the side of the pan in an effort to escape.
And that sound the lobster makes - is that hissing simply the noise made by trapped air or do lobsters really cry? The American novelist David Foster Wallace recently wrote a piece for Gourmet magazine, based on his visit to last year's Maine Lobster Festival, a week-long fair that takes place in the very heart of lobster-eating and catching country and is dedicated to all things crustacean.
Having watched the events, he concluded of the lobsters' behaviour when plunged into a boiling pan: "The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water. If you permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the Maine Lobster Festival can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest."
The Scottish-based group Advocates for Animals (AFA) last year issued a report that collated much of the available science and concluded that lobsters, crabs and cephalopods - namely octopus, squid and cuttlefish - do experience pain.
It concluded: "The treatment of lobsters is of particular concern as they are typically cooked alive in boiling water. The animals struggle violently during this process. Crabs and lobsters can also suffer during transportation and storage in overcrowded conditions, with lobsters often having their claws bound together with plastic bands. Many lobsters get open wounds and injuries between capture at sea and arrival at the processing plant."
The group has been lobbying both the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at Westminster and the Scottish Executive's Environment and Rural Affairs Department to include these animals in their animal welfare bills. Defra's bill is still going through the House of Lords and the AFA has argued that a recent report issued by a panel by the European Food Safety Authority supports their claims.
That report says: "The scientific evidence clearly indicates that [decapod crustaceans] are able to experience pain and distress."
AFA's director, Ross Minett, said last night: "We believe there is sufficient evidence. Can they suffer, can they experience pain? There is little doubt at all."
Such a view is also supported by the British lawyer and inventor Simon Buckhaven, from Bedfordshire, who is marketing his self-designed method of killing lobsters. He said the so-called Crustastun, which comes in two sizes designed for either restaurants or fish processors, stunned the lobsters using an electrical current, which then kills them.
He said: "People are becoming more aware. We were showing the design in Geneva, a city in a land-locked country, and people were coming up to us and saying, 'Thank-you'. They did not like they idea of boiling lobsters but they said, 'We love eating them otherwise.'"
The economic background against which this ethical and scientific debate is taking place is huge. According to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine, 183 million lbs of lobster are caught annually in the US and Canada, of which 25 per cent are sold live.
The selling and cooking of live lobsters is beyond cruel. Lobsters are crammed in to small containers stuffed with many more lobsters and are often unfed until death. The merchants choose not to feed the lobsters in order to stop their excretement filling up the tanks. These invertebrate may try to eat each other or starve to death before a torturous death. Lobsters are cut open, an agonizing process, and then boiled alive just so their freshness can be retained for the restauranteers to enjoy. Many restaurants argue that lobsters do not have very well developed nervous systems so they do not experience the pain. In reality, these lobsters feel the same pain as any other animal including humans. They suffer immensly from the boiling water and will try to scratch the tank and escape, though unfortunately they cannot. Please sign this petition and ask 10 lobster merchants to stop such animal cruelty.
The same thing exactly is to be said about King crabs, eels, simple crabs and other mollusks.
eels crabs and other shellfish are sold in large supermarkets and hypermarkets still alive, and languish for days on end, dying with his paws on the ice, no food or drink, a slow death that ends when they are burning in boiling water, sometimes stacked as legless, or crowded in restaurant aquariums, attacking each other in a fight for some space, end with a death that could not be worse: in boiling water! This inhuman trade, unworthy of rational human beings can not continue as if these poor species were only mere objects when only being hypocrites or with very little intelligence we can say that they are! nor can we defend cats and dogs because we have them as pets, forgetting that they are not the only ones to feel pain and suffering. This petition and its signatories require the end of live eels trade as well as lobsters, King crabs, crabs and other shellfish alive for days in supermarkets on the ice, machines, or other ways to keep them alive to kill them in boiling water in the end! We want it to be forbidden anywhere! Also should be prohibited the inhumane way they are stored alive in tanks in restaurants. In some Nordic countries, northern Europe, they have engines, machines that kill instantly even fish …(I’ve seen it in a documentary) so that they may not agonize in asphyxiation! the more this kind of species! is what we demand: compassion for these beings.
~Here are some articles on this that should be taken into consideration, but before that I leave you with some last research news: “…In her book ”Do Fish Feel Pain?” (Oxford University Press, 2010), Braithewaite presents her case that fish, like most other organisms, are capable of experiencing pain and that humans can cause fish to suffer.
Here at Discovery News we’ve covered similar research that concluded lobsters, crab and other shellfish feel pain too. For me, it would be a surprise if they didn’t, but scientists have been struggling for ways of proving the obvious here. I think Braithewaite does a good job of summarizing the latest findings.
Braithewaite found that fish have the same kinds of specialized nerve fibers that mammals and birds use to detect noxious stimuli, tissue damage and pain. She also explored whether fish are sentient beings and whether an organism must possess “awareness” to experience pain…”
Some recipes go to the extreme of CUTTING THE CRUSTACEANS ALIVE IN HALF…!!! Totally unacceptable, totally brutal and unworthy of human beings to act like this.
http://www.think-differently-about-sheep.com/Animal-rights-Aquatic-Animals.htm
http://www.animalsaustralia.org/factsheets/fish_crustaceans.php
http://www.globalanimal.org/2010/12/07/new-research-fish-feel-pain-too/26135/
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/fishwelfare.htm
http://www.nofima.no/marin/en/forskningsomrade/1553229309884291122
www.humanesociety.org/.../hsus-the-welfare-of-...
crustastun.com/.../crustastun%20leaflet%203010... -
The challenge to the meat and fish industry is to devise methods of killing animals and fish in more humane ways…WITH YOUR SUPPORT AND RESEARCH! Invest on it with the help of specialists for the sake of those who have the right not to be confronted with these brutalities all the time: those have rights too! Specially children, I assure you, do not forget some images, some sad scenes of cruelty towards animals! They should be respect too!
We thank you for your attention, awaiting response, sincerely, the undersigned:
Your Excellency:
The controversy about keeping lobsters idling for months in tanks in supermarkets or restaurants goes claw in claw with the debate about the appropriate way to kill the creature should you decide to eat one.
While some argue that the only humane way to kill a lobster is to cleave its head with a large sharp knife, cookbooks and culinary texts have traditionally suggested plunging the animal into a pan of rapidly boiling water. Some have instead suggested bringing the pan of water to the boil with the lobster in it, so that it gets knocked out slowly but does not - so the theory goes - feel any pain.
This is all fine in theory. But as anyone who has ever tried to cook a lobster by plunging it into boiling water knows, the lobster rarely co-operates. Rather than sitting and dying quietly, the lobster will thrash about and hook its claws over the side of the pan in an effort to escape.
And that sound the lobster makes - is that hissing simply the noise made by trapped air or do lobsters really cry? The American novelist David Foster Wallace recently wrote a piece for Gourmet magazine, based on his visit to last year's Maine Lobster Festival, a week-long fair that takes place in the very heart of lobster-eating and catching country and is dedicated to all things crustacean.
Having watched the events, he concluded of the lobsters' behaviour when plunged into a boiling pan: "The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water. If you permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the Maine Lobster Festival can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest."
The Scottish-based group Advocates for Animals (AFA) last year issued a report that collated much of the available science and concluded that lobsters, crabs and cephalopods - namely octopus, squid and cuttlefish - do experience pain.
It concluded: "The treatment of lobsters is of particular concern as they are typically cooked alive in boiling water. The animals struggle violently during this process. Crabs and lobsters can also suffer during transportation and storage in overcrowded conditions, with lobsters often having their claws bound together with plastic bands. Many lobsters get open wounds and injuries between capture at sea and arrival at the processing plant."
The group has been lobbying both the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at Westminster and the Scottish Executive's Environment and Rural Affairs Department to include these animals in their animal welfare bills. Defra's bill is still going through the House of Lords and the AFA has argued that a recent report issued by a panel by the European Food Safety Authority supports their claims.
That report says: "The scientific evidence clearly indicates that [decapod crustaceans] are able to experience pain and distress."
AFA's director, Ross Minett, said last night: "We believe there is sufficient evidence. Can they suffer, can they experience pain? There is little doubt at all."
Such a view is also supported by the British lawyer and inventor Simon Buckhaven, from Bedfordshire, who is marketing his self-designed method of killing lobsters. He said the so-called Crustastun, which comes in two sizes designed for either restaurants or fish processors, stunned the lobsters using an electrical current, which then kills them.
He said: "People are becoming more aware. We were showing the design in Geneva, a city in a land-locked country, and people were coming up to us and saying, 'Thank-you'. They did not like they idea of boiling lobsters but they said, 'We love eating them otherwise.'"
The economic background against which this ethical and scientific debate is taking place is huge. According to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine, 183 million lbs of lobster are caught annually in the US and Canada, of which 25 per cent are sold live.
The selling and cooking of live lobsters is beyond cruel. Lobsters are crammed in to small containers stuffed with many more lobsters and are often unfed until death. The merchants choose not to feed the lobsters in order to stop their excretement filling up the tanks. These invertebrate may try to eat each other or starve to death before a torturous death. Lobsters are cut open, an agonizing process, and then boiled alive just so their freshness can be retained for the restauranteers to enjoy. Many restaurants argue that lobsters do not have very well developed nervous systems so they do not experience the pain. In reality, these lobsters feel the same pain as any other animal including humans. They suffer immensly from the boiling water and will try to scratch the tank and escape, though unfortunately they cannot. Please sign this petition and ask 10 lobster merchants to stop such animal cruelty.
The same thing exactly is to be said about King crabs, eels, simple crabs and other mollusks.
eels crabs and other shellfish are sold in large supermarkets and hypermarkets still alive, and languish for days on end, dying with his paws on the ice, no food or drink, a slow death that ends when they are burning in boiling water, sometimes stacked as legless, or crowded in restaurant aquariums, attacking each other in a fight for some space, end with a death that could not be worse: in boiling water! This inhuman trade, unworthy of rational human beings can not continue as if these poor species were only mere objects when only being hypocrites or with very little intelligence we can say that they are! nor can we defend cats and dogs because we have them as pets, forgetting that they are not the only ones to feel pain and suffering. This petition and its signatories require the end of live eels trade as well as lobsters, King crabs, crabs and other shellfish alive for days in supermarkets on the ice, machines, or other ways to keep them alive to kill them in boiling water in the end! We want it to be forbidden anywhere! Also should be prohibited the inhumane way they are stored alive in tanks in restaurants. In some Nordic countries, northern Europe, they have engines, machines that kill instantly even fish …(I’ve seen it in a documentary) so that they may not agonize in asphyxiation! the more this kind of species! is what we demand: compassion for these beings.
~Here are some articles on this that should be taken into consideration, but before that I leave you with some last research news: “…In her book ”Do Fish Feel Pain?” (Oxford University Press, 2010), Braithewaite presents her case that fish, like most other organisms, are capable of experiencing pain and that humans can cause fish to suffer.
Here at Discovery News we’ve covered similar research that concluded lobsters, crab and other shellfish feel pain too. For me, it would be a surprise if they didn’t, but scientists have been struggling for ways of proving the obvious here. I think Braithewaite does a good job of summarizing the latest findings.
Braithewaite found that fish have the same kinds of specialized nerve fibers that mammals and birds use to detect noxious stimuli, tissue damage and pain. She also explored whether fish are sentient beings and whether an organism must possess “awareness” to experience pain…”
Some recipes go to the extreme of CUTTING THE CRUSTACEANS ALIVE IN HALF…!!! Totally unacceptable, totally brutal and unworthy of human beings to act like this.
http://www.think-differently-about-sheep.com/Animal-rights-Aquatic-Animals.htm
http://www.animalsaustralia.org/factsheets/fish_crustaceans.php
http://www.globalanimal.org/2010/12/07/new-research-fish-feel-pain-too/26135/
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/fishwelfare.htm
http://www.nofima.no/marin/en/forskningsomrade/1553229309884291122
www.humanesociety.org/.../hsus-the-welfare-of-...
crustastun.com/.../crustastun%20leaflet%203010... -
The challenge to the meat and fish industry is to devise methods of killing animals and fish in more humane ways…WITH YOUR SUPPORT AND RESEARCH! Invest on it with the help of specialists for the sake of those who have the right not to be confronted with these brutalities all the time: those have rights too! Specially children, I assure you, do not forget some images, some sad scenes of cruelty towards animals! They should be respect too!
We thank you for your attention, awaiting response, sincerely, the undersigned:
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