Amazon.co.uk is allowing live lobsters to be sold through its online Marketplace. These helpless animals are cruelly packaged and delivered by post as if they were nothing more than a parcel of socks. Once they reach their destination, they endure an agonising death.
Lobsters are sentient beings, and in an official report presented to the European Commission, a panel of scientific experts agreed beyond doubt that they can suffer and feel pain – just as dogs, cats, pigs, and humans can.
In their ocean home, lobsters can journey more than 100 miles a year using a series of complicated signals to navigate their environment. Keeping them in cramped containers and transporting them vast distances denies them the opportunity to engage in any of their natural behaviour. The stress this causes is exacerbated when they're removed from salt water, as they're unable to breathe properly in the open air.
Most of those purchased from Amazon will likely end up being boiled alive. This killing method has been described as "unnecessary torture" by researcher Gordon Gunter in Science journal, and lobsters who endure this cruel fate have been known to writhe wildly and scrape at the sides of the pot in a desperate attempt to escape from the scalding-hot water.
Please send a message now to Amazon UK Country Manager John Boumphrey asking him to ban the sale of lobsters and other live animals.