An image saying the title of the story "Eat or be eaten" and author "C.-N. Alexandrina Guran". It also includes the logo of Science & Fiction and a picture of a red lobster.

A chef at a seafood restaurant takes a closer look at her dishes.

Content warning

Implied animal cruelty

The short story

As she was about to drop the lobster in the pot of boiling water, she paused. She had done this hundreds of times, if not thousands. It was part of her job – serving hungry customers the delicious and fresh seafood they had paid for. But today, she had made the mistake of looking into the lobster’s eyes. Or had it looked into hers? What a silly thought. It was a lobster. It did not look into people’s eyes. At least not on purpose.

Metal lid in the left hand, lobster in the right, she stayed like this, staring the lobster in its eyes, for a good while. She snapped out of it, and looked furtively around her. No one else was in the kitchen. Quickly, she dunked the lobster into the water bucket under the workstation and closed the pot of boiling water. She couldn’t bring herself to do throw him in this time, somehow.

She seized the opportunity as a waiter entered. “Hey, we’re out of lobster, you need to tell table 4 they need to order something else. The last one we had must’ve died in the bucket. I’m gonna take him out now.” Him? When had the lobster become a he? She was sweating, somehow feeling as if she may burst into tears. As she walked out through the back with the bucket of water, to her surprise tears flowed down her cheeks. Thankfully, the bins were in the parking lot, and it was already dark when she put the bucket on the passenger seat.

The last hours of her shift were hard to get through. More food, more animals had to be prepared and served and eaten. When she sat down in her car, she closed her eyes for a while. In the darkness, she could sense she was not alone in the car. On the seat next to her sat an animal, a being she realized was capable of some kind of experience. If not suffering, at least pain. An existence which she almost carelessly boiled alive. She tried not to look at the bucket, for fear of meeting those eyes again. Deep and dark and small, but seeing eyes. Eyes connected to a central nervous system, one that was probably, in the grand scheme of things, not that unlike her own.

Back in her apartment, she managed to look at the lobster again. In his bucket, he was lazily moving his antennae. He was her responsibility now, he was hers. Of course, the only thing she knew about lobsters was how to prepare and eat them. What kind of food did they eat? How could she make him comfortable? Could she keep him as a pet even? Tonight, all she could do was a perfunctory google search after which she concluded to fill her bathtub halfway with cold water, open the window to let the cool air in.

She was exhausted, more than usual from a shift at the restaurant. While she brushed her teeth, she looked at her lobster, walking around in his makeshift tank. Partly to reclaim her bathtub, but also because the whole point of her previous out-of-the blue compassion and realization moment was for the lobster to not feel pain or distress, she had to figure out something quickly. Maybe she could drive to the sea, a few hours away, and just release him back into the wild? Had he ever lived in the sea? Turning the light off in her bathroom, she said goodnight to her lobster.

Tomorrow she would go to a pet store and maybe a vet office and figure the rest out. And she was going to have look for another job.

This story was originally written in English.

The paper

Conte, F., Voslarova, E., Vecerek, V., Elwood, R. W., Coluccio, P., Pugliese, M., & Passantino, A. (2021). Humane Slaughter of Edible Decapod Crustaceans. Animals, 11(4), 1089. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11041089

Mercogliano, R., & Dongo, D. (2023). Fish welfare during slaughter: the European Council Regulation 1099/09 application. Italian Journal of Food Safety, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.4081/ijfs.2023.10926

Connection between story and paper

It is a popular misconception that fish or crustaceans do not feel pain. The barbaric practice of cooking lobsters, other decapods and sea-dwellers alive is still very prevalent despite more humane preparation methods. A paper by Mercogliano and Dongo summarizes the current consensus on crustacean sentience: we can be very confident that crustaceans, of which lobsters are but one species, are sentient beings capable of pain and distressing experience - they fullfil all but one criteria (7/8) for conscious experience, similar to many other animals we keep as pets. The paper by Conte and colleagues highlights a large variety of different methods available for the slaughter of Decapod Crustaceans and fish, and the respective amount of distress they cause, with boiling alive being particularly bad.

When we choose to consume animal products, we should try to minimize the pain and suffering animals go through. Many people operate under the misconception that animals like fish and shellfish do not have the necessary physical predispositions (nervous systems, nociceptors) to feel pain. This is not true, and I hope this short story in combination with some papers provides some critical thinking points to revisit our common food practices, such as boiling shellfish alive.

I had the idea for this story, when inadvertently locking eyes with a lobster at the checkout register of a Neapolitan seafood restaurant this fall. Thanks to Dr Edoardo Arcuri for pointing me to these papers.

The author

Alexandrina Guran studied psychology and neuroscience and conducts noninvasive research in animals, to learn about their cognitive world. She has written and produced a play, runs a data communication blog and continues to write fiction in her free time, both in English and German.

Dr. Helena Hartmann
Dr. Helena Hartmann
Neuroscientist, psychologist and science communicator (she/her/hers)