Rachel Martin 

Professor Miller 

English Composition

28 March 2023

Title 

Do lobsters feel pain when they are being boiled alive? Do they understand what is happening to them when they are boiling in someone’s pot? As a society, have we sugarcoated reality enough to the point where we have no remorse or respect for other living creatures? In “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace, Wallace touches on this topic and dives deeper into the meaning of sentience. 

Sentience defined by Merriam Webster is a “feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought.” In simpler terms, this means that sentient beings show some distinguishable form of consciousness. It has been debated if lobsters are sentient or not. According to the Animal Welfare Sentience Bill, “lobsters, octopus and crabs and all other decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs” have been recognized as being sentient creatures (Gov.uk). Without this reassurance, would people continue to boil these creatures alive, not knowing that they are conscious? Or even yet, will people continue to boil them even with the assurance? 

The first time I ever read David Foster Wallace’s piece, “Consider the Lobster,” I was a bit uncomfortable, as were most people. For those who have never thought about or “considered” a subject like that, it can be sort of a sore subject. At first, I was upset that I never put deeper thought into this topic before. Whenever my family cooked lobster, I hadn’t stopped to think about what the lobster would be going through. I guess I never realized that they were put into the pot alive, I always thought they were killed beforehand. As I read it a second time though, I got increasingly more frustrated. I was frustrated at the fact that boiling lobsters alive was a normalized occurrence. Knowing that these creatures are sentient and can consciously feel what is being done to them should make people rethink how they want to cook their surf and turf meal that day. But, the lobsters could just be a mask for a larger theme in this reading. 

Was Wallace only writing about lobsters, or did he want to insert a larger, hidden message in “Consider the Lobster?” In my opinion, the lobsters were just scratching the surface of how animal processing has been sugarcoated by society. People buy meat from their local supermarket everyday, but do they ever think about how that meat ended up there? For years, decades even, people have mentally blocked out this process. Not only that, but the meat processing industry does not necessarily advertise the process to the public. People would be too disgusted or shocked, and business would plummet. 

Large corporations advertise their meat products in appetizing ways to appeal to their consumer audience. They use words such as “juicy” and “tender.” They do not want to publicly show the issue that is industrial farming. Most animals are subject to crowding in small, tight pens, are never brought outside to graze on grass in natural sunlight, and some can catch disease which causes them to suffer a slow and painful death. Other animals can fall subject to these conditions, but they affect more commonly farmed animals such as cows, chickens, fish, and pigs. Showing this sad truth to the public would negatively affect large corporations as well as the employees that are involved with this industry, which is the reason why it is not talked about more.

A reading that we did in class that reminds me of “Consider the Lobster” was “What the Crow Knows” by Ross Andersen. In this piece, Andersen discusses the more complex side of animals. Andersen mentions observing the religion of Jainism, “an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals.” The Jains are extremely devoted to their religion and go to great lengths to abide by their rules. For example, “their white robes are cotton, not silk, which would require the destruction of silkworms. During monsoon season , they forgo travel, to avoid splashing through puddles filled with microbes.” They go so far as to avoid disturbing some of the smallest organisms on the planet. 

Andersen and Wallaces’ pieces share many similarities as they both bring attention to the deeper complexity of animals that most people miss everyday. Anderson spoke of crows and how they “have an unusually large brain for their size” and “their neurons are packed densely relative to other animals.’” Crows learn from their environments; this can be shown in one crow population in Japan. This population “uses traffic to crack open walnuts: The crows drop a nut in front of cars at intersections, and when the light turns red, they swoop in to scoop up the exposed flesh.” These kinds of behaviors can show us the more conscious and complex side of animals. So if there are no immediate signs of sentience within an animal, does that simply mean that they are not conscious? 

Our own preferences and pleasures have taken priority over these animals’ lives. And since society does not want to think about that harsh reality, we use other names to cover it up. Rather than calling it “cow meat,” we use beef. For chicken and turkey, we use poultry, and for pigs we use pork. I suppose we are not obligated to think about the animal while we are eating it, but should we? Animals are crucial to the stability of ecosystems and should be respected. They should not just be thrown in a pot of boiling water and forgotten about. The alleviating mindset that society uses to gloss over the issue with meat and animal products does not just stop at animals. 

It is almost human nature to pacify issues within our lives to make them seem more bearable. Whether it is going out the night before a big exam to relieve some stress and anxiety, spending the day in bed after a long day prior, or telling ourselves that the problem is not as big as we think it is. It is not unusual for people to forget about the “little things,” such as meat and the animals it comes from, when everyone is caught in their own whirlwind of life everyday.