An Open Letter to People Who Boil Animals Alive

Dear Reader,

Being boiled alive is easily one of the worst ways to die. Imagine this:

As boiling water touches your body, your extremities are the first to burn. These extremities include your fingertips, which have more nerve endings than many other areas of your body.

Once your outer layers are “cooked, your organs will begin to heat up until the liquid in your body starts boiling them. Your entire body will turn red and start to blister. You may even smell yourself boiling. (Are you gagging yet? Did the body-boiling-your-organs line get you?)

You’ll feel the intense pain. It will be prolonged. And you’ll be conscious for most of it, provided your brain doesn’t boil first. It’s not a quick death by any means.

I always knew how horrible boiling animals alive was. So much so that I refused to eat animals killed in this way (mainly lobsters) before I went vegan. Even as a child I knew what it felt like to be burned by boiling water and steam simply from cooking pasta. I couldn’t imagine inflicting that pain on an animal’s entire body.

I was appalled last week reading of a restaurant in Maine that purportedly gets lobsters stoned before boiling them alive. Can you even believe?

First off, even if getting a lobster high on marijuana (if that’s even possible) did reduce the excruciating pain of being boiled, I highly doubt it’s by much. I don’t think any human who’s been stoned would volunteer to test it out themselves.

Second, let’s be real: This is less about being “humane and more about assuaging the guilty consciences of the restaurateur and cooks who know boiling animals alive is absolute torture. Instead of dipping lobsters in bong water, the humane thing to do is to take lobsters off the menu once and for all.

The truth is that lobsters and other crustaceans exhibit pain-avoidance behaviors indicative of sentience and feeling. While their experience would be somewhat different from a human’s because of basic biology, the pain and slow death are extremely similar.

But it’s not just lobsters and crabs. Shockingly enough, The Washington Post reported that about 1 million chickens and turkeys are “unintentionally boiled alive each year thanks to the meat industry. Because the killing line at a slaughterhouse moves so quickly, many birds are improperly shackled, miss the throat-cutting blade entirely, and are fully conscious when dumped into the scalding feather-removal tank.

And just last year in the U.K., a safety report from the Food Standards Agency found that thousands of farmed animals had been scalded alive. If you can’t imagine how much pain they endured, scroll up and start reading this article again from the top.

Now I ask you: If you wouldn’t want this to be your fate, or the fate of your dog or cat, why would you ever support an industry that routinely scalds animals alive? Think about it.