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You can no longer boil a lobster alive in Switzerland, unless you stun it first:
The Swiss government has ordered an end to the common culinary practice of throwing lobsters into boiling water while they are still alive, ruling that they must be knocked out before they are killed.
As part of a wider overhaul of Swiss animal protection laws, Bern said that as of 1 March, "the practice of plunging live lobsters into boiling water, which is common in restaurants, is no longer permitted". Lobsters "will now have to be stunned before they are put to death," the government order read.
According to Swiss public broadcaster RTS, only electric shock or the "mechanical destruction" of the lobster's brain will be accepted methods of stunning the animals once the new rule takes affect.
Also at BBC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @04:43PM
The problem is that even if we do accept the idea that animals feel pain the way that we do, it's very hard to establish how much medication to give or when they're feeling pain as many animals behave like they're not in pain so as not to become targets for predators.
Establishing how much pain humans feel is hard enough, what's a relatively minor discomfort for one person might be a very serious pain for somebody else. Since, animals aren't able to communicate in a way we understand, it's hard to establish how much pain they're feeling or even if they're in pain. Some behaviors can be assumed to be a response to pain, but we don't really have any way of knowing for sure.
The whole situation sucks, but anesthesia is a tricky state to create and maintain. Too much medication and there's brain damage and or death and not enough and the patient is in pain. Up until relatively recently we had medical doctors performing surgery on patients with little or no anesthetic.