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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: 3, Informative) by acid andy on Saturday January 13 2018, @08:26PM
Nature is wonderfully complex and incredibly diverse. There is great cruelty and great suffering but also in other places great kindness and great pleasure. Many animals are arguably capable of some degree of empathy. When mammals look after their own young they experience positive emotions and some animals have arguably been observed to grieve (elephants for example I understand).
Of course I understand that for the purposes of your argument, the cruel indifference is what's relevant. I just think it's important to remember that, on balance, "Nature is cruel" is an oversimplification.
Humanity too, is capable of great kindness as well as great cruelty but the difference is that we, usually, have the intellectual capacity to understand the full implications of our actions in terms of the pleasure or suffering of those organisms they affect.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?