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Into the pot you go: Maine restaurant sedates lobsters with marijuana smoke
Lobsters in one Maine restaurant go out in a blaze of glory once they hit the pot. The owner of a lobster joint is sedating her crustaceans with marijuana smoke before cooking them – granting them, she says, a blissfully humane death.
Charlotte Gill, owner of Charlotte's Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, told the Portland Press Herald that she had been looking for a way to reduce the suffering of her signature menu item. She experimented with blowing marijuana smoke into a tank with one lobster, Roscoe (basically, she hot-boxed him). When Gill then removed Roscoe's claw bands and returned him to a tank with the other lobsters, she says, he was less aggressive. Gill has a medical marijuana license.
She plans to offer this cooking method as an option for customers who want their lobsters to be baked before they're boiled. But that doesn't mean customers will get stoned from their dinner.
"THC breaks down completely by 392 degrees, therefore we will use both steam as well as a heat process that will expose the meat to 420-degree extended temperature, in order to ensure there is no possibility of carry-over effect," Gill told the Press Herald. So where some see a humane death for the lobster, others see a waste of perfectly good weed.
Related: Switzerland Bans Lobster Boiling Without Stunning or Killing Them
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 22 2018, @08:54PM (7 children)
Or is this just a PR gimmick?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday September 22 2018, @09:06PM (1 child)
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878964/lobster-cannabis-high-pain-thc-animal-rights [theverge.com]
This article suggests the whole thing is bullshit.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @12:26PM
They probably do have the receptor [wiley.com] and it does affect neuromuscular activity (citations in that paper). However, this does not necessarily mean they feel better when treated. Maybe it makes them feel much worse...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday September 22 2018, @09:29PM (3 children)
If it affects crustaceans like it does humans, then getting it mega-stoned will make its death all the more horrifying.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 22 2018, @10:41PM (2 children)
My marine science teacher explained pain and cruelty thusly: if the critter tries to run away, you're probably causing it stress and/or pain. If it just sits there while you do X, it's probably o.k. with X. General statement in response to a question about the ethics of passing an electric current through sea urchins to make them expel their gametes.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 22 2018, @11:54PM (1 child)
How the hell would a sea urchin run away? They're parapelagic. You should tie your professor to a chair and pass electric current to make him expel his gametes, then ask him if he wants to join PETA.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @12:20AM
Parapelagic? Benthic, actually, but I see what you (almost) did there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 22 2018, @10:29PM
That's a serious problem, many animals hide their pain and in this case, you can't really see or assess the degree to which lobsters are or aren't being hurt in the process. The end result is that this is just a marketing stunt. If they really wanted to kill them painlessly, there's probably better methods.