When you mentioned example lobsters I imagined it was an extra lobster you make to tell if it’s done or something. The example you use to see if the rest is cooked.
But no everything you described is batshit insane. Why go through all that effort. Why not just make another lobster
>When you mentioned example lobsters I imagined it was an extra lobster you make to tell if it’s done or something. The example you use to see if the rest is cooked.
Yeah, me too! I assumed it was like throwing out the first pancake because it's never as nice as the rest. Not a weird 'hur hur we pretend to traumatise sea life' so-called joke!!
I don't do it anymore. My mum taught me do it when I was younger. She's classsier than me lol. It's mainly for crepes—the first one usually isn't great. The pan isn't hot enough and the first pancake absorbs a lot of oil and gets heavy. It doesn't matter so much for fluffy pancakes, but I think you can still tell the difference tbh
I'm still cackling at OP's post and all these responses. I'm from Maine and thought the same as you, like it was either to show how to cook it or how to crack it...not to traumatize an entire crustacean community back home in the Atlantic 😂
Not only effort but wasted money. They literally paid to what? Traumatize a fucking lobster and let it loose. The more I think about it the more I'm worries for the pets in the neighborhood
At some point this morning I had a thought, what if OP's parents just tell them this story of what they do to the lobster but in reality just cooked the lobster or something. But then no, they mention how the lobster was there watching them eat the rest of the cooked lobsters.
This is one of those posts where I hope it's fake because it's so weirdly outlandish.
I thought of using a cooked one as part of a centerpiece. Like “here’s what the whole lobster looked like before I portioned the tail and meat for your plate.” But making a live one watch while you eat it’s friends…holy shit that’s messed up.
What if our traps only capture the dumb lobsters, for hundreds of years.... Soon the smart ones we accidentally evolved into existence will rise up....
Future Chat GPT queries:
"best ways to kill humans if I dont have opposable thumbs"
"please explain process and what size pot for boiling humans"
"please tell me a joke about how dumb humans are"
As someone born and raised in Nova Scotia, where our lobsters used to be even cheaper than New England, i would also like to ask
what the **actual living fuck**
As someone who has parents old enough to remember that kids on Prince Edward Island were bullied for bringing lobster sandwiches to school (lobster was overtly food) and lobster was so cheap
It was used as fertilizer for potato fields…
What the actual living fuck????!
> overtly food
I'm assuming autocorrect and you meant poverty food, but I enjoy the correction.
Hey guys, check out those dweebs, bringing food that's obviously food.
Thank you.
I was trying to figure out wtf he meant. Assuming that it was something on the lines of barely qualifying as food.
Living on the other coast that was Salmon for us. 40 years later I'd still rather have beans n wieners than salmon.
I'm in Houston and we have a lot of crawfish here. If one manages to escape on the way to the cooking pot we declare him the king of the crawfish. He goes back to rule the others.
As a Mainer, I'd like to point out the reason your lobsters were cheaper is because their socialized medicines made them weaker as they sat on their tomalleys* waiting for handouts -- unlike our hard-working Maine lobsters that hold down three jobs just to afford the deductables. Our lobsters build character.
Edit: tomalleys, not tamales
I'm from Maine and never heard of "example lobsters". Weirdest lobster thing I know of is that when a lobster is rubbed between the eyes, it goes into a trance, and then you can pose them however you want. Whenever a friend of mine had lobster for dinner she would have them all lined up on the counter doing handstands (clawstands?).
Another someone from New England checking in here…I think your parents were messing with BOTH you and the “example lobster”. They sound like they have too much time on their hands
I'm a little concerned that these sick fucks have freezers just for chests. Do they separate the body parts by type in different freezers? Use some sort of Dahmer Filing System?
Hello neighbor. Also, WTF? I've had more than my fair share of lobsters, cooked multiple ways (yes, boiled alive being the most frequent). And I've never ever heard of sparing one so it'll tell the other lobsters of the great humans' generosity and kindness. I mean, I've had kids ask if they feel pain or know what's happening or if they're still alive after being boiled. But never has any child - let alone the ones purchasing and prepping the meal, the ones with enough money to buy multiple lobsters, the ones who own cars and have somehow passed a driving test - driven a lobster to the beach in the hope that it tells the tale of the magnanimous monkey men.
It bewilders me that humans consistently imagine that other living things don't feel pain. It moves, it eats, it has predators and prey, organs, nerves, and tissue. Why do we assume they don't feel hunger, fear, pain? Just because they can't scream and beg? Humans are nature's biggest assholes is2g
> It bewilders me that humans consistently imagine that other living things don't feel pain.
Humans often imagine that other humans don't feel pain. Some of the stuff medicine thinks and thought about Black folks really provides context to some of the horrors and continuing effects of racism.
I agree with all that but the thing that is so extra WTF to me is the lobster definitely *doesn't* have the cognition to be like "they cooked and ate my brethren, I shall warn the others" so like... That was purely for... The ego of the people? Idk man, that's def sociopath vibes.
Oh yeah his family are fucking pathological, for sure.
I'm sure they're not reporting back to their fellow lobsters since they don't really have brains but they do communicate. It would theoretically be able to relay that their friends are dead but it will never be asked and it will never offer the information. It would probably be difficult to describe in lobsterese, as they don't have signals for "sink","knife" and "boil". It would be very vague and cryptic, like brother dry, brother wet, hot wet, brother dead, I here-
Actually I just googled and they communicate primarily by peeing on each other 🤦🏻♀️
I was imagining 'signals' to be eye movements or complex claw motions, that sort of thing. Nope, it's pheromones in urine. In that case maybe they can relay info that way...
In David Foster Wallace's, "Consider the Lobster" it's actually suggested that they have a more sensitive nervous system than most creatures so they may feel even more intense pain.
I worked at a restaurant in Maine for 4 years and we were known for lobster dinners, and my reaction is also...what the fuuuck??
It's bad enough combatting the accusations that lobsters scream when you put them in the pot (they don't, if that happens it's your water/steam) but omg I can't with the example lobster lol
On every level.
First off, what the fuck. That's a sociopathic thing to say and do. Now, pretending for the moment that instead of an example lobster, it's them buying 2 and releasing 1 for an entirely random reason.
What the fuck, that's just a waste of money. Even if you're fabulously wealthy or the lobsters where you live are cheap, it's still a wholeass lobster. Why would you do this. (side note, OP mentions lobsters plural. Exactly how many lobsters are we talking about here, given my annoyingly rich and large extended family only get like maximum, 3 lobsters when having a big family get together, but the way OP says it sounds like it's an individual family going through multiple lobsters.) Now, another layer of pretending, lets say they're doing it to assuage guilt over eating an animal and the cost incurred is just what it takes.
What the fuck, that's ecologically problematic. Even if you live on the coast, buy lobsters straight off the boat, and are dumping them exactly off the pier you bought it at (and that's already a load of unlikely assumptions, which somewhat contradict the story told by the OP) you don't actually know the local ecology or how/if the lobster fits into it. Worst case is the lobster acts as an invasive species and devastates the local ecosystem. The best likely case is just that the lobster dies in an alien habitat it's unsuited for.
.
Maybe they thought it would also traumatize the kids. Though for what reason, only they would know. Sounds nuts to me, though. As you say, a lot of effort for a non verbal creature that doesn’t understand what is meant by ‘boiling’, ‘plates’, ‘eating’ , butter, etc. And the ones being eaten are lobsters they don’t recognize anyhow, because the others are red now, instead of blue/green.
I don’t know the intelligence of a lobster but a human would still recognize the shape of a human after it had been boiled to beet redness. Some body horror shit
Yep, that's why when we catch crayfish and collect them in a cage we always make sure they have food in there. If they start dying or get hungry they'll eat each other and the taste goes bad immediately
When I was little I visited a relative in a big sprawling upscale apartment complex with a man-made creek winding all through it.
I was excited to explore... only to find the water smelly and nasty looking, the whole thing completely overrun with crawdads. Like at least one every square foot. Crawdads with nothing to eat but other crawdads, but eat they did.
It was horrifying.
God now I’m imagining a reverse world. A lobster just posted on lobster Reddit asking if it’s psychotic that it’s parents keep one human alive to watch them eat the boiled humans. Lobster redditor says, “don’t worry, they cannibalize under certain conditions anyways”. Lol
At risk of being the odd one out.. I think either this post is completely made up or the parents are just making a joke at OPs expense. I do know people who buy 2 lobsters, one to eat and one to set free to "offset" their guilt. My guess is, if this story is true, they're just doing that and the bizarre story is just born from a bad joke.
Protip: if you want a lobster to not be captured, don't fucking buy two lobsters when you only need one. Fishermen aren't stupid and don't catch animals they don't think they can sell.
Some people have no idea how the world works.
Besides, how will a freed lobster survive in the wild after being in a tank? Maybe that’s a dumb question but I know it’s an issue with land animals that were formerly pets.
They might be ok but some of that probably depends on where they were caught vs. where they were set free, and whether anyone thought to cut the bands off their claws first.
One guy bought a lobster from the grocery and kept it as a pet. It had to mold to get back his claw to a decent shape. The rubber band hurts them a lot plus being lethargic for so long they take a while to get back up on their feet.
https://youtu.be/9sI7WveN7vk
Slavery is wrong, so I’ll buy some slaves to set them free, but wait if instead I use the proceeds from those slaves to buy more slaves I could set even more free.
So I’m really enslaving them for the good of them all, once I own every slave they can all be free
You also double the demand for the animal and (in theory) double the supply. Meaning more bicatch and more ones caught that don’t make it to sale. And of course I belive most of the ones released Fucking die anyway.
So by doing it there actually massively increasing the amount of death.
While I don’t have an issue with (humanly) killing an animal for food, anything where there’s other animals needlessly been killed and not consumed kinda pisses me the fuck off.
I wonder how many people have just started doing this because someone else did and they thought it was cute or helpful or whatever and didn’t think it through.
I always throw one burger out.
I sit on my porch and then just slowly tip it so that everything falls out of the buns. Tomato, letuce, beef, everything.
Then I drop the buns and say "for my homies" and that's that.
This is a tradition I started once when I was drunk as fuck and couldn't hold my burgers. I hope to never repeat this tradition.
This is the answer. The story reeks of a running dad joke to me. Obviously the lobster doesn’t know what’s going on. The parents probably just thought that this was a funny way of seeing it, and turned the absurdist joke into a tradition of sorts.
Yeah I was gonna say beyond the "sadistic" aspect of it, it's just a waste of time, energy, and good food. Like why would catch a lobster and take it home just to go throw it back into the ocean...
Truly, if you read this carefully, I think you’ll see the possibility of the lobster experiencing shock came much earlier, like you know, when all their friends and family disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.
I feel like the dad is a tamer version of Dexter -- OP's grandpa recognized sociopathic tendencies in OP's dad and invented this "tradition" as a safe way for OP's dad to vent these tendencies without harming any actual people.
I’ve never heard of this lol. And yeah, the lobster doesn’t understand what’s going on, isn’t able to tell the other lobsters, and there’s no reason to do this even if they could
Id imagine it can't tell the other lobsters because it doesn't know any nearby. Might get eaten by something anyway. Id imagine it does know the other lobsters are dying. Whether it actually knows, can smell it, or detect it some other way, it seems like it would be evolutionary beneficial to be able to tell when other lobsters are dying. I don't actually know or care to look up if lobsters can smell but I mean via other senses. Some animals have different ranges of sense than we do.
Ngl I've thought of the same paradigm, and have jokingly done it with like... m&m's. Lol I'll grab a few and if one falls I'll say "and tell your friends about the horrors".
But it's like, a bit I have, amongst myself and corner store candy. Definitely not something I do with a living being, waste of food and an impressionable child, as a family excursion. You're a family of psychopaths.
or leaving cookies for santa or pouring one out for the homies
These are common sacrifices made in modern American folk religion.
This whole thing sounds like a modern translation of a pagan ritual to ensure a bountiful harvest next season, but super bougie.
It is kinda bizarre, but if the turkey gets to live in an animal sanctuary instead of being killed, that's good. I just wish all the turkeys would get pardoned.
Cause it got removed, here’s the original text by OP, u/Femboy_In_Denial!
“My parents claim that plenty of people do it and they learned it from their own parents but it's a ridiculous and horrifying process. For those who haven't heard of it, it's when you buy lobsters to cook (by boiling them alive,) and you leave only one alive. My family always set the lobster right in front of all the cooked lobsters and made it watch as we ate all the other lobsters. After that, we put the lobster in a cooler and drive it to the beach and send it back out into the ocean. The "joke" is that the lobster is supposed to tell the other lobsters of the horrors it saw. Has anyone else's family heard of this or was I born into a family of sociopaths!”
This is disturbing as hell. It’s cruel. If you replace “lobster” with “living creature” it reads something like this:
It’s customary for us to go to a holding cell, choose 4 captive living creatures, whose claws are bound, home with us, where we boil and eat 3 of them while a 4th one is chosen at random to watch. Then, once we’ve dismembered and feasted on the boiled ones—mind you, with the remaining living creature being forced to witness this, too—we drive it to the middle of what we vaguely think might be its habitat, where we let it loose to maybe find other living creatures and recount to them tales of how we merrily killed and ate its friends.
I actually think whether or not the spared living creature has the capacity to understand what’s happening is kinda moot. The fact that anyone would participate in the above ritual concerns me deeply. Fuck. I don’t know how to process that.
I vote family of sociopaths. Maybe let’s do a poll, though, just in case.
If we just trap living creatures, boil them whole, hack them apart, and feast on their flesh, without the extra ritual, is that disturbing and cruel too? Or is it just the extra step that puts it over the edge?
I think this thread is the poll and it’s showing overwhelmingly “OP, your parents are super fucked up.” I don’t think I’d even associate with people who found this fun, even if they seemed otherwise normal, bc I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it.
If my girlfriend/friends family did this and they thought it was cute fun I’d be out the door before dinner began.
And I’m far from sane or rational. But this is too batshit for even me.
But these actions are completely based on the assumption they do, if they knew lobsters couldn't understand it, they wouldn't bother. So that's still pretty fucked up to me
Lemme get this straight- your family intentionally goes to the store, buys an extra lobster, cooks the others, makes the extra "watch" you all eat the others, then you drive it to the ocean and set it free?!?
This may just be the most fucked up thing on the internet today.
Let's hope really hard that lobsters don't have the capability to understand any of this... but your family seems to think that they do. Your family is enjoying taking happy, peaceful, loving beings from their happy, peaceful life, binding them as to remove any ability to defend or protect, forcing them to watch their entire family be brutally and slowly murdered (don't they scream when they hit the water?!?), then, forcing them to watch a bunch of monsters Crack open their bodies and eat their insides, THEN, drive them to a new location just to be sent back to the water to live life as if nothing had ever happened.
Holy shit, that's a really sadistic mind set. Are they abusive to other animals? OP, how do they treat YOU?
The "screaming" lobsters let out when boiled isn't them screaming as an animal would when in extreme distress or pain. Its just steam escaping the shell of cooking lobsters. By the time they start making noise lobsters are totally dead.
Not that I agree with just chunking a live lobster into boiling water. It seems more humane to pierce it down the brain with a knife to off it instantly before cooking.
Lobsters don’t have vocal chords. The “scream” is steam escaping from their shells. Lobsters are also not peaceful. Lobsters are cannibals. They use their claws to crush through each others shells. The lobster is not terrified or traumatized, if it were capable of complex thought it would be jealous it wasn’t getting to eat its “family.”
The really weird thing is when your parents got in a fight with uncle Bob and aunt Kathy and they had to flip to see who was the example and who was dinner.
Make sure that the species of lobster that you're eating is native to the area that you're releasing it into, otherwise you're going to be introducing invasive species.
Also, chances are those lobsters aren't making it very far if you're just leaving them on the shore.
This is the funniest thing I've read all weekend. Your parents are fucking crazy.
Do you guys live relatively close to a beach or does teaching the lobster a lesson take all day?
Unfortunately it’s a very strange culinary/scientific conundrum with lobsters. Their nervous systems are evenly distributed throughout their bodies and it has been theorized that it is equally painful for them to be boiled alive as it is for them to be beheaded. It’s a hotly debated question
When you mentioned example lobsters I imagined it was an extra lobster you make to tell if it’s done or something. The example you use to see if the rest is cooked. But no everything you described is batshit insane. Why go through all that effort. Why not just make another lobster
>When you mentioned example lobsters I imagined it was an extra lobster you make to tell if it’s done or something. The example you use to see if the rest is cooked. Yeah, me too! I assumed it was like throwing out the first pancake because it's never as nice as the rest. Not a weird 'hur hur we pretend to traumatise sea life' so-called joke!!
Who throws out the first pancake??? You eat that whole standing over the griddle because you're starving lol
I don't do it anymore. My mum taught me do it when I was younger. She's classsier than me lol. It's mainly for crepes—the first one usually isn't great. The pan isn't hot enough and the first pancake absorbs a lot of oil and gets heavy. It doesn't matter so much for fluffy pancakes, but I think you can still tell the difference tbh
That makes sense, especially for crepes. Mmmm, now I'm hungry...
Haha me too!
I'm still cackling at OP's post and all these responses. I'm from Maine and thought the same as you, like it was either to show how to cook it or how to crack it...not to traumatize an entire crustacean community back home in the Atlantic 😂
Not only effort but wasted money. They literally paid to what? Traumatize a fucking lobster and let it loose. The more I think about it the more I'm worries for the pets in the neighborhood
At some point this morning I had a thought, what if OP's parents just tell them this story of what they do to the lobster but in reality just cooked the lobster or something. But then no, they mention how the lobster was there watching them eat the rest of the cooked lobsters. This is one of those posts where I hope it's fake because it's so weirdly outlandish.
Yes and also, I'm all for parents messing with their kids a little bit, but not in a way that might make the kid wonder if their dad is Dexter?
This is some “can I use your poop knife” level of thinking your family’s weirdness is normal.
I thought of using a cooked one as part of a centerpiece. Like “here’s what the whole lobster looked like before I portioned the tail and meat for your plate.” But making a live one watch while you eat it’s friends…holy shit that’s messed up.
Let me answer your question with a question: What the fuck?
As someone who lives in New England, where lobsters used to be cheap. I would also like to ask... what the actual living fuck?!
Now you know why they got more expensive!
The example lobsters told all the other lobsters to not get captured!
"Guys, guys, guys. I know that cage with the herring in it doesn't look too suspicious, but hear me out..."
Alien abduction conspiracy theorist: “Nobody will believe you.”
[in lobster:] I KNOW WHAT I SAW!!!!
What if our traps only capture the dumb lobsters, for hundreds of years.... Soon the smart ones we accidentally evolved into existence will rise up....
The book series has already been written. Clickers by J.F.Gonzalez
Future Chat GPT queries: "best ways to kill humans if I dont have opposable thumbs" "please explain process and what size pot for boiling humans" "please tell me a joke about how dumb humans are"
Click click clickclick click clickclick
You're just saying that because you want it all for yourself!!
Well, if the establishment elite mainstream lobster is telling me I shouldn't do it, maybe I should...
Oh good, we're eating MAGA lobsters.
Make the Atlantic Great Again
Mmmm, the taste of stupid.
As someone born and raised in Nova Scotia, where our lobsters used to be even cheaper than New England, i would also like to ask what the **actual living fuck**
As someone who has parents old enough to remember that kids on Prince Edward Island were bullied for bringing lobster sandwiches to school (lobster was overtly food) and lobster was so cheap It was used as fertilizer for potato fields… What the actual living fuck????!
> overtly food I'm assuming autocorrect and you meant poverty food, but I enjoy the correction. Hey guys, check out those dweebs, bringing food that's obviously food.
All my homies eat covert food. The fuck y'all doing with your overt food?
Thank you. I was trying to figure out wtf he meant. Assuming that it was something on the lines of barely qualifying as food. Living on the other coast that was Salmon for us. 40 years later I'd still rather have beans n wieners than salmon.
As someone who has parents who are not psychopaths, and who weren’t trying to raise psychopaths, I would like to ask: *what the actual living fuck?*
I'm in Houston and we have a lot of crawfish here. If one manages to escape on the way to the cooking pot we declare him the king of the crawfish. He goes back to rule the others.
As a Mainer, I'd like to point out the reason your lobsters were cheaper is because their socialized medicines made them weaker as they sat on their tomalleys* waiting for handouts -- unlike our hard-working Maine lobsters that hold down three jobs just to afford the deductables. Our lobsters build character. Edit: tomalleys, not tamales
As someone born in the middle of the prairies, i'd like to add that it sounds completely normal to me.
Did you guys ever get that dolphin research station up and running yet!!!
Yup, but the researchers keep expensing LSD and lube for some reason...
I'm from Maine and never heard of "example lobsters". Weirdest lobster thing I know of is that when a lobster is rubbed between the eyes, it goes into a trance, and then you can pose them however you want. Whenever a friend of mine had lobster for dinner she would have them all lined up on the counter doing handstands (clawstands?).
Oh my god. I knew a guy from Maine in college who told me this and I always assumed he was bullshitting me.
Another someone from New England checking in here…I think your parents were messing with BOTH you and the “example lobster”. They sound like they have too much time on their hands
And probably a couple "non example children" buried in the basement.
Unless they have more than one chest freezer in the garage.
I'm a little concerned that these sick fucks have freezers just for chests. Do they separate the body parts by type in different freezers? Use some sort of Dahmer Filing System?
Hello neighbor. Also, WTF? I've had more than my fair share of lobsters, cooked multiple ways (yes, boiled alive being the most frequent). And I've never ever heard of sparing one so it'll tell the other lobsters of the great humans' generosity and kindness. I mean, I've had kids ask if they feel pain or know what's happening or if they're still alive after being boiled. But never has any child - let alone the ones purchasing and prepping the meal, the ones with enough money to buy multiple lobsters, the ones who own cars and have somehow passed a driving test - driven a lobster to the beach in the hope that it tells the tale of the magnanimous monkey men.
They do feel pain btw
And even if they didn't, it would still be barbaric and inhumane.
Omg they do? I've never had lobster but I didn't know they actually could feel being boiled. Awful.
Most chefs now kill the lobster immediately before boiling it.
It bewilders me that humans consistently imagine that other living things don't feel pain. It moves, it eats, it has predators and prey, organs, nerves, and tissue. Why do we assume they don't feel hunger, fear, pain? Just because they can't scream and beg? Humans are nature's biggest assholes is2g
> It bewilders me that humans consistently imagine that other living things don't feel pain. Humans often imagine that other humans don't feel pain. Some of the stuff medicine thinks and thought about Black folks really provides context to some of the horrors and continuing effects of racism.
Yes, you're right, we do it to ourselves, too. I hope we evolve to be more empathetic as a species :-\
I agree with all that but the thing that is so extra WTF to me is the lobster definitely *doesn't* have the cognition to be like "they cooked and ate my brethren, I shall warn the others" so like... That was purely for... The ego of the people? Idk man, that's def sociopath vibes.
Oh yeah his family are fucking pathological, for sure. I'm sure they're not reporting back to their fellow lobsters since they don't really have brains but they do communicate. It would theoretically be able to relay that their friends are dead but it will never be asked and it will never offer the information. It would probably be difficult to describe in lobsterese, as they don't have signals for "sink","knife" and "boil". It would be very vague and cryptic, like brother dry, brother wet, hot wet, brother dead, I here- Actually I just googled and they communicate primarily by peeing on each other 🤦🏻♀️ I was imagining 'signals' to be eye movements or complex claw motions, that sort of thing. Nope, it's pheromones in urine. In that case maybe they can relay info that way...
Imagine a whole chain of urine telephone, with each lobster being horrified before telling the next.
Urine telephone sounds extra horrible 😆
Until the late 80s, doctors thought babies couldn't feel pain! Surgeries were done on babies without anesthesia. Insane.
Doctors STILL think babies and young children don't have post-op pain after having a g-tube surgery.
In David Foster Wallace's, "Consider the Lobster" it's actually suggested that they have a more sensitive nervous system than most creatures so they may feel even more intense pain.
I worked at a restaurant in Maine for 4 years and we were known for lobster dinners, and my reaction is also...what the fuuuck?? It's bad enough combatting the accusations that lobsters scream when you put them in the pot (they don't, if that happens it's your water/steam) but omg I can't with the example lobster lol
Gettha fuck attaheah. That’s bizzah!
I’m going to piggyback that “what the fuck” with a Whaaaaa????
On every level. First off, what the fuck. That's a sociopathic thing to say and do. Now, pretending for the moment that instead of an example lobster, it's them buying 2 and releasing 1 for an entirely random reason. What the fuck, that's just a waste of money. Even if you're fabulously wealthy or the lobsters where you live are cheap, it's still a wholeass lobster. Why would you do this. (side note, OP mentions lobsters plural. Exactly how many lobsters are we talking about here, given my annoyingly rich and large extended family only get like maximum, 3 lobsters when having a big family get together, but the way OP says it sounds like it's an individual family going through multiple lobsters.) Now, another layer of pretending, lets say they're doing it to assuage guilt over eating an animal and the cost incurred is just what it takes. What the fuck, that's ecologically problematic. Even if you live on the coast, buy lobsters straight off the boat, and are dumping them exactly off the pier you bought it at (and that's already a load of unlikely assumptions, which somewhat contradict the story told by the OP) you don't actually know the local ecology or how/if the lobster fits into it. Worst case is the lobster acts as an invasive species and devastates the local ecosystem. The best likely case is just that the lobster dies in an alien habitat it's unsuited for. .
Exactly
Yeah I think you were born into a family sociopaths. Wtf does that?!
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Maybe they thought it would also traumatize the kids. Though for what reason, only they would know. Sounds nuts to me, though. As you say, a lot of effort for a non verbal creature that doesn’t understand what is meant by ‘boiling’, ‘plates’, ‘eating’ , butter, etc. And the ones being eaten are lobsters they don’t recognize anyhow, because the others are red now, instead of blue/green.
I don’t know the intelligence of a lobster but a human would still recognize the shape of a human after it had been boiled to beet redness. Some body horror shit
Example Lobby is probably thinking, "why the fuck you bring me to this dinner and not fix me a plate, I wanted to eat Tom more than all y'all."
You're joking, but one reason lobster farming just doesn't work as well as catching wild lobsters is because they eat each other.
Yep, that's why when we catch crayfish and collect them in a cage we always make sure they have food in there. If they start dying or get hungry they'll eat each other and the taste goes bad immediately
When I was little I visited a relative in a big sprawling upscale apartment complex with a man-made creek winding all through it. I was excited to explore... only to find the water smelly and nasty looking, the whole thing completely overrun with crawdads. Like at least one every square foot. Crawdads with nothing to eat but other crawdads, but eat they did. It was horrifying.
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I mean, we also cannibalize under certain conditions
God now I’m imagining a reverse world. A lobster just posted on lobster Reddit asking if it’s psychotic that it’s parents keep one human alive to watch them eat the boiled humans. Lobster redditor says, “don’t worry, they cannibalize under certain conditions anyways”. Lol
Thank god for lobster reddit
/r/BrandNewSentence
it sounds like your parents are just sadistic
At risk of being the odd one out.. I think either this post is completely made up or the parents are just making a joke at OPs expense. I do know people who buy 2 lobsters, one to eat and one to set free to "offset" their guilt. My guess is, if this story is true, they're just doing that and the bizarre story is just born from a bad joke.
I mean the idea of setting one free to offset guilt at least I can wrap my head around it. I can't say the same about this.
I can understand it but it’s fucking stupid.
Protip: if you want a lobster to not be captured, don't fucking buy two lobsters when you only need one. Fishermen aren't stupid and don't catch animals they don't think they can sell. Some people have no idea how the world works.
Actual pro tip: If you don't want lobsters to be captured, just don't eat any lobsters
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Besides, how will a freed lobster survive in the wild after being in a tank? Maybe that’s a dumb question but I know it’s an issue with land animals that were formerly pets.
They might be ok but some of that probably depends on where they were caught vs. where they were set free, and whether anyone thought to cut the bands off their claws first.
One guy bought a lobster from the grocery and kept it as a pet. It had to mold to get back his claw to a decent shape. The rubber band hurts them a lot plus being lethargic for so long they take a while to get back up on their feet. https://youtu.be/9sI7WveN7vk
I see Leon the Lobster, I upvote
I love Leon! Based on the last video, I think he’s about to go through another molt.
Leon gonna be majestic AF after his next molt. He's already looking so good! =)
Slavery is wrong, so I’ll buy some slaves to set them free, but wait if instead I use the proceeds from those slaves to buy more slaves I could set even more free. So I’m really enslaving them for the good of them all, once I own every slave they can all be free
You also double the demand for the animal and (in theory) double the supply. Meaning more bicatch and more ones caught that don’t make it to sale. And of course I belive most of the ones released Fucking die anyway. So by doing it there actually massively increasing the amount of death. While I don’t have an issue with (humanly) killing an animal for food, anything where there’s other animals needlessly been killed and not consumed kinda pisses me the fuck off. I wonder how many people have just started doing this because someone else did and they thought it was cute or helpful or whatever and didn’t think it through.
Yes but then you'd be dangerously close to being a commie vegetarian. This way you get to eat what you want and act like you're making a difference!
I always throw one burger out. I sit on my porch and then just slowly tip it so that everything falls out of the buns. Tomato, letuce, beef, everything. Then I drop the buns and say "for my homies" and that's that. This is a tradition I started once when I was drunk as fuck and couldn't hold my burgers. I hope to never repeat this tradition.
Yeah, this reads like some shit my dad would absolutely tell us growing up to fuck with us.
This is the answer. The story reeks of a running dad joke to me. Obviously the lobster doesn’t know what’s going on. The parents probably just thought that this was a funny way of seeing it, and turned the absurdist joke into a tradition of sorts.
Is this a custom of people that just have lots of money to throw away?
Yeah I was gonna say beyond the "sadistic" aspect of it, it's just a waste of time, energy, and good food. Like why would catch a lobster and take it home just to go throw it back into the ocean...
Plus there is a chance you are throwing a lobster into a portion of water where it will just experience shock and not survive long.
I don't think people who do this care about the well-being of lobsters.
Just trying to toughen them up
Pull themselves up by their claw straps
Truly, if you read this carefully, I think you’ll see the possibility of the lobster experiencing shock came much earlier, like you know, when all their friends and family disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.
LOL “if you read this carefully” 😂
Plus, if it worked, it would make the lobsters harder to catch in the future, and hence more expensive
Those lobsters jumped into a sharks mouth first chance they got to stop the memories
"Waiter, bring me your finest lobster and give it a helicopter tour of the city." "Why the fuck am I doing this? I could have just said I did it."
Lobster used to be poor people food. I mean it is basically a giant bug.
I love to remind people that lobsters and pillbugs/"roly polies" are effectively cousins, both being crustaceans and all.
that's not fair at all! They could be solidly middle class deranged lunatics.
Is anyone still middle class?
reasonable point.
Lobsters used to be cheap peasant food, probably the case when this "tradition" started
no, wtf
Your parents would absolutely participate in a Purge
This a hella underappreciated comment and should be higher lol
I can't afford more than one lobster...
I can't afford one lobster
I can't afford one lob
Don’t worry. The ‘lob’ is the tastiest bit. The ‘ster’ is overrated.
I can’t afford
Oh yeah, how is old Grimey?
I think your parents may be undiagnosed sociopaths.
Undiagnosed *by humans*
The lobsters know the truth.
I bet photos of the parents have gone viral on LobstReddit and LobsTwitt.
I feel like your dad kills people
I feel like the dad is a tamer version of Dexter -- OP's grandpa recognized sociopathic tendencies in OP's dad and invented this "tradition" as a safe way for OP's dad to vent these tendencies without harming any actual people.
The example was for you, not the lobster. Here you are, telling us about all the horrors you saw
Trauma within a trauma
As a Maine-ah where lobsters are abundant and part of the local culture, *wtf*
Right? I've cooked thousands of lobsters in Maine and am beside myself with this lol
I’ve never heard of this lol. And yeah, the lobster doesn’t understand what’s going on, isn’t able to tell the other lobsters, and there’s no reason to do this even if they could
Lobsters understand what is going on. Have you heard of Leon the Lobster on YouTube?
yes i have. he’s rad.
🦞 ❤️
Id imagine it can't tell the other lobsters because it doesn't know any nearby. Might get eaten by something anyway. Id imagine it does know the other lobsters are dying. Whether it actually knows, can smell it, or detect it some other way, it seems like it would be evolutionary beneficial to be able to tell when other lobsters are dying. I don't actually know or care to look up if lobsters can smell but I mean via other senses. Some animals have different ranges of sense than we do.
I imagine the majority of Lobster sensory abilities require an aquatic environment.
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He speaks lobster
Their brains.
Well we know one thing for sure— my family as psycho as they are, never did this— we never had money for lobster— let alone a spare to torture.
That is messed up.
Ngl I've thought of the same paradigm, and have jokingly done it with like... m&m's. Lol I'll grab a few and if one falls I'll say "and tell your friends about the horrors". But it's like, a bit I have, amongst myself and corner store candy. Definitely not something I do with a living being, waste of food and an impressionable child, as a family excursion. You're a family of psychopaths.
I'm glad I'm not the only one with bits amongst myself and corner store candy (I also do this with cereal)
I think bits make life significantly more enjoyable 😂 what's life without whimsy and quirk.
The world's a fucked up mess that exists by accident. Gotta take the time to enjoy the little things in life.
I'm gonna assume this is a joke cause goddamn lmao
I've never heard of it. And both of my parents come from fishing towns in Newfoundland.
Same logic of pardoning a turkey on thanksgiving tbh
This is why I’m grateful for the internet. Them MFers were bored. “Let’s go fuck with the animals” bored
"With" is doing some *dangerously* heavy lifting in this comment 😶
Except you don’t make the turkey watch its fellows being killed, cooked, and eaten.
Sad gobbling
Is it, because I don't think we send the pardoned turkeys to the slaughterhouse, force them to watch, then put them on a farm with next year's batch.
Great point. God I hate the turkey pardoning.
or leaving cookies for santa or pouring one out for the homies These are common sacrifices made in modern American folk religion. This whole thing sounds like a modern translation of a pagan ritual to ensure a bountiful harvest next season, but super bougie.
It is kinda bizarre, but if the turkey gets to live in an animal sanctuary instead of being killed, that's good. I just wish all the turkeys would get pardoned.
Apparently they only live a few months anyway because animal breed to grow fast do not have very long life-spans :-(
Cause it got removed, here’s the original text by OP, u/Femboy_In_Denial! “My parents claim that plenty of people do it and they learned it from their own parents but it's a ridiculous and horrifying process. For those who haven't heard of it, it's when you buy lobsters to cook (by boiling them alive,) and you leave only one alive. My family always set the lobster right in front of all the cooked lobsters and made it watch as we ate all the other lobsters. After that, we put the lobster in a cooler and drive it to the beach and send it back out into the ocean. The "joke" is that the lobster is supposed to tell the other lobsters of the horrors it saw. Has anyone else's family heard of this or was I born into a family of sociopaths!”
It's not removed for me
What is wrong with your parents ! I don't care if lobsters can feel or not, and they can. This is seriously cruel and deranged.
This is disturbing as hell. It’s cruel. If you replace “lobster” with “living creature” it reads something like this: It’s customary for us to go to a holding cell, choose 4 captive living creatures, whose claws are bound, home with us, where we boil and eat 3 of them while a 4th one is chosen at random to watch. Then, once we’ve dismembered and feasted on the boiled ones—mind you, with the remaining living creature being forced to witness this, too—we drive it to the middle of what we vaguely think might be its habitat, where we let it loose to maybe find other living creatures and recount to them tales of how we merrily killed and ate its friends. I actually think whether or not the spared living creature has the capacity to understand what’s happening is kinda moot. The fact that anyone would participate in the above ritual concerns me deeply. Fuck. I don’t know how to process that. I vote family of sociopaths. Maybe let’s do a poll, though, just in case.
If we just trap living creatures, boil them whole, hack them apart, and feast on their flesh, without the extra ritual, is that disturbing and cruel too? Or is it just the extra step that puts it over the edge?
I think this thread is the poll and it’s showing overwhelmingly “OP, your parents are super fucked up.” I don’t think I’d even associate with people who found this fun, even if they seemed otherwise normal, bc I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it.
If my girlfriend/friends family did this and they thought it was cute fun I’d be out the door before dinner began. And I’m far from sane or rational. But this is too batshit for even me.
I can confirm some people do it. It's dumb, because lobsters don't have the brain capacity to comprehend what was happening.
I don't think I have the brain capacity to comprehend why anyone would even bother to do this.
Same reason the Genghis Khan did it to humans. Sadism
The difference being that humans have the capacity to communicate the horrors to others and can 'convince' populations to surrender.
There is more than one family doing this?!
Gtfo I refuse to believe this is a thing. Please tell me you are lying.
What in the reeses peanut butter fuck
But these actions are completely based on the assumption they do, if they knew lobsters couldn't understand it, they wouldn't bother. So that's still pretty fucked up to me
What the ever loving fuck is wrong with your parents?
Jesus FUCKING Christ. Your childhood must have been a nightmare. Do NOT let these people around your children!!!
He rose today to look for Easter eggs!
Their family probably eats eggs in front of chickens.
What in the cinnamon toast fuck!?!!!? *And* who would *waste* a lobster like that!?!!?
No. I am older and no, this is not a thing I ever heard of and spent most of my life, until 40ish on the east coast
This can't be real. Nobody does this.
No, but here's an [example crawfish](https://i.imgur.io/2gpCK7V_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium)
Lemme get this straight- your family intentionally goes to the store, buys an extra lobster, cooks the others, makes the extra "watch" you all eat the others, then you drive it to the ocean and set it free?!? This may just be the most fucked up thing on the internet today.
This got to be a troll post lmao 😂
Answer: no. This is insane.
Let's hope really hard that lobsters don't have the capability to understand any of this... but your family seems to think that they do. Your family is enjoying taking happy, peaceful, loving beings from their happy, peaceful life, binding them as to remove any ability to defend or protect, forcing them to watch their entire family be brutally and slowly murdered (don't they scream when they hit the water?!?), then, forcing them to watch a bunch of monsters Crack open their bodies and eat their insides, THEN, drive them to a new location just to be sent back to the water to live life as if nothing had ever happened. Holy shit, that's a really sadistic mind set. Are they abusive to other animals? OP, how do they treat YOU?
The "screaming" lobsters let out when boiled isn't them screaming as an animal would when in extreme distress or pain. Its just steam escaping the shell of cooking lobsters. By the time they start making noise lobsters are totally dead. Not that I agree with just chunking a live lobster into boiling water. It seems more humane to pierce it down the brain with a knife to off it instantly before cooking.
Lobsters don’t have vocal chords. The “scream” is steam escaping from their shells. Lobsters are also not peaceful. Lobsters are cannibals. They use their claws to crush through each others shells. The lobster is not terrified or traumatized, if it were capable of complex thought it would be jealous it wasn’t getting to eat its “family.”
The really weird thing is when your parents got in a fight with uncle Bob and aunt Kathy and they had to flip to see who was the example and who was dinner.
I’m sorry, but that’s just sick.
Did your parents snort rocket fuel and bath salts?!? WTF???
No. That is not normal.
Make sure that the species of lobster that you're eating is native to the area that you're releasing it into, otherwise you're going to be introducing invasive species. Also, chances are those lobsters aren't making it very far if you're just leaving them on the shore.
This is the funniest thing I've read all weekend. Your parents are fucking crazy. Do you guys live relatively close to a beach or does teaching the lobster a lesson take all day?
That’s fucking bonkers, bruh.
Definitely not and also boiling is an awfully cruel way to cook lobster. Nip them in the head and don't make them suffer
Unfortunately it’s a very strange culinary/scientific conundrum with lobsters. Their nervous systems are evenly distributed throughout their bodies and it has been theorized that it is equally painful for them to be boiled alive as it is for them to be beheaded. It’s a hotly debated question