This is a petition to Grocery Stores to ask them to stop selling lobsters to be boiled alive. I will send this to grocery stores to ask them to stop selling lobsters and to free the ones that they have. I would love if everyone would print this petition and send it to grocery stores which sell lobsters. We could all make a difference in the lives of these creatures. They are strange looking, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be boiled alive! Thank you all.
"As an invertebrate zoologist who has studied crustaceans for a number of years, I can tell you the lobster has a rather sophisticated nervous system that, among other things, allows it to sense actions that will cause it harm. Lobsters can, I am sure, sense pain."
-Jaren G. Horsley, Ph.D.
Yet, despite this, we boil them alive?
If grocery stores kept live pigs or chickens crammed inside tiny glass tanks along with recipes suggesting that the animals be boiled alive, there would be a lot more vegetarians! We, the undersigned, know that whenever we walk by one or your lobster tanks it saddens us to see the lobsters suffering. Please free the lobsters as we will not buy from your grocery store until you do so. Thus it will cost you more money to sell the lobsters than to free them.
Take a look the next time you're at the store: Often, lobster tanks are filthy and overcrowded, with lobsters piled on top of each other, as I witnessed your grocery store this week. Even under the best of circumstances, eating lobsters can be a public health risk. Seafood is the number one cause of food poisoning in the United States, and shellfish are involved in more than 66 percent of all seafood-related illnesses. In fact, as much as 10 percent of raw shellfish are infected with organisms that can cause hepatitis, salmonella poisoning, cholera, and even death. Keeping these sea animals in filthy tanks doesn't make them any safer!
It is also cruel to confine animals of any species to a small space and slowly starve them. Most lobsters in restaurant and grocery store tanks are never fed in order to prevent the water from being fouled with excrement. Of course, this does nothing to protect consumers from the mercury, DDT, PCB's, dioxin, disease-causing bacteria, and other contaminants that are commonly found in lobster flesh.
