Analysis of Consider the Lobster: The Ethics of Eating Lobster

In David Wallace’s article “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace’s talks about people’s morals on consuming lobsters, asking if the choice is righteous. Wallace discusses the Maine Lobster Festival where many people attend and have over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught lobster each year by different methods on how to kill the lobster justifiable.

He goes into depth about lobsters by talking about the history behind lobsters, defining the word “lobster,” and the evolution of the use of lobsters from back then in the past to the present day. Wallace later continues to talk about how he finds the way lobsters are boiled alive very unethical. He debates the points of the morality of the killing of lobsters by describing that a lobster does not have the same parts as a human to feel any pain but then refutes that by saying exactly what happens when you boil a lobster alive and how lobsters have a preference.

Wallace continues to talk about the morals and ethics of consuming lobster. He also tries to compare the Festival to a hypothetical Nebraska Beef Festival where they would be watching the animals get slaughtered, like the MLF, and points out how that would be far from acceptable. He later focuses on food in general when PETA activists begin to protest. Wallace explains how people love to eat lobster because of the “maximum freshness” but a lot of people cannot handle the action of killing them because they show signs of suffering. He also talks about how one-day people in the future will look back at us now and see us as ruthless in the way we treated animals like we do now with tribes in the past.

After reading assigned texts like this they give me a unique perspective and view on how someone else, or in this case an animal, can feel pain and what they go through just for us to survive by eating them. I had a whole new understanding and respect for the appreciation of those who are vegetarian or even vegan because of the way they treat animals and the way we kill them because go through issues and problems like this every day. David Wallace is asking the readers if they are okay eating animals knowing the suffering they go through just, so we can survive to eat each and every day. Wallace also uses real-life situations and references to build this reading by mentioning other festivals that do the same thing of slaughtering animals in front of people even though they like that because of the freshness.

Throughout “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace consistently talks about how it unethical to be killing animals for our benefit just, so we can eat. He consistently asks the readers if the choice is righteousness even though we know its morally wrong. Wallace just wants to inform the readers about the choices we make when eating animals and how these choices influence us to think otherwise. After reading this article, I feel that the choices we make about animals, so we can eat are very unethical and it is not righteous, but it is necessary for us to survive and considering how an animal felt all the time would always hold us back from actually killing them and force us to find a harder way to obtain food.