Jack Hamill

Professor miller

Eng 110

27 Mar 27, 2023

When looking at david foster wallace “consider the lobster”, the reader is able to see a very wide spectrum of ideas many people have to offer and tests the limits of other peoples means and wills by exploring the everlasting question of is it wrong to eat animals. Wallice expands his ideas further by highlighting events at the Maine lobster festival and diving deep with the preparation of lobsters and indulging in lobster. The lobster festival is a perfect example of peoples of all over coming together to celebrate the death of a crustacean for the pleasure of others. Wallice condescendingly continues to talk about how lobsters are able to show a preference to not be lowered into a pot of boiling water and actually grab onto the side of the pot to prevent being lowered, this is similar to the behavior of frogs when they are fried or steamed they often attempt to jump out of the container they are being “housed” in. This behavior has been studied and many researchers claim plenty of animals’ nervous systems are closely wired to ours such as most birds and or the lobster. This would reshape the way many people go about treating animals and the insects that are vital to our environment. In the end of his speech he continues to further ask what the most humane way to kill a lobster is and claims “there are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other”. I believe by taking a further look into previous articles read such as what the crows know and can earth feed 10 billion people, we will be able to compare and contrast different ideas of each author and come to a common consensus of what is being done agriculturally in our world and what we can do better as global citizens. 

David Foster Wallice provides excellent contextual information about how every year people gather to eat and have a good time with friends, family and lobster. Wallice remarks that he finds it interesting that lobster are one of the only animals to be cooked while they are still living and goes on about how researchers have done many experiments to debunk the theory that a lobster can’t feel pain and it’s true, lobsters nervous systems are very complex and may take even longer to die if boiled alive. Looking at statements like these we are easily able to make connections between the humane way to treat animals such as in the article “what the crows know” the people that had worked at the animal hospital and researched these different birds had found that birds brains are very complex and similar to the way humans use their brains. Different birds show different patterns and traits for survival such as dropping nuts into heavy traffic to ease the pain of opening the nut, the birds use their resources. We can look at this further by asking the question, is it truly correct to take an animal’s life when they show obvious preference not to be killed. Furthering our understanding, when we sit down at a dinner table and are presented with a steak dinner, most of us do not necessarily consider the bloodshed that it had taken for this meal to even be possible. This is because most of this process is kept away from most people’s eyes. This does not mean that whatever happens in these slaughterhouses is perfectly okay and many protests have been done to set laws in place for these types of situations. 

“Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and practices in much of the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments and mengele’s experiments”?(consider the lobster) referring to the experiments done on lobsters and how they react when captured and put in a small enclosure with other lobsters, they tend to shy away from being freed or show an unwillingness to be taken out of the tank. This was previously thought to have just been because the lobster was in an unfamiliar environment but we are now learning that they show a much complexer brain than we had anticipated. With this knowledge rising to the surface we understand why lobsters and many other animals share similar tendencies to resist change when they’re perfectly suitable for the environment they are being taken from.