Century old lobster killed......at the hands of PETA

quote:

---

Animal rights activists were appalled when they learned that a 15-pound, 100-year-old lobster was about to become someone’s dinner in Florida. So they organized to “rescue” it and deliver it to an aquarium in Maine. They even gave it a name: Larry.

---

quote:

---

Cause of death? Overeager animal rights activists, it would seem.

After Larry was spotted on the local news for his gigantic size, an organization called iRescue raised money to pack Larry in ice and gel packs and ship the lobster from Sunrise, Florida in a styrofoam container. Larry’s journey up the east coast to Maine was only supposed to take one day. Instead, Larry didn’t arrive until over a week later.

---

quote:

---

When Larry was first packaged for shipping last week, FedEx refused to take him. The restaurant’s styrofoam container was said to be leaking and iRescue, the animal rights organization that was paying for the “rescue,” had to pick up the package and arrange for Larry to have a temporary home in some tank somewhere else.

The iRescue team packed up Larry again eight days later and used different gel packs and a different styrofoam container—presumably one that wouldn’t leak. Larry was finally shipped successfully on Tuesday, but when Larry finally arrived at the Maine State Aquarium around noon on Wednesday he was dead.

And frankly, it sounds like iRescue should’ve used some more cold gel packs if they wanted to give Larry a shot at surviving the journey.

“This lobster had a bit of a, you know, circuitous route from its origin,” Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the Department of Marine Resources told the Portland Press Herald. “You need to really surround it in gel packs. This container really only had three.”

---

quote:

---

Hot on the heels of the Maine State Aquarium’s acquisition of a 110-year-old lobster named Larry, PETA sent a letter this morning to the facility calling for the old-timer to be released back into the ocean that he called home for over a century.

---

quote:

---

“Lobsters are smart, unique individuals who feel pain and suffer in captivity,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on the Maine State Aquarium to let this elderly crustacean live out his golden years in freedom and peace.”

According to invertebrate zoologist Dr. Jaren G. Horsley, lobsters have a “sophisticated nervous system” and feel “a great deal of pain” when they are cut open. When dropped into scalding water, they whip their bodies wildly and scrape the sides of the pot in a desperate attempt to escape. And because lobsters do not enter a state of shock when they’re hurt, they’re believed to feel every moment of their slow, painful deaths when they are cooked alive—a practice that researcher Gordon Gunter described in the journal Science as “torture.”

---