(photo credit: Lobster Zone website)
After issuing an action alert against Doc Ryan’s for the establishment’s use of a “Lobster Zone” machine, PETA has achieved victory. The Illinois pub has agreed to remove the cruel contraption. PETA credits the hundreds of compassionate website visitors who helped urge the bar to pull the game.
"Victory! Thanks to hundreds of compassionate people like you, Doc Ryan's has decided to remove the Lobster Zone machines from its bar," the animal rights organization posted in the action center of their website.
The Lobster Zone resembles a child’s arcade game found in many restaurants and shopping centers, in which children guide a mechanical claw over a stuffed animal and deliver the winnings down a chute. The Lobster Zone, however, does not deal in fuzzy faux bears rather contestants who take part in the disturbing game are aiming for live lobsters. At $2 a pop, the hungry patron gets 30 seconds to snag a lobster and send it sliding down a ramp into a bucket which will then be delivered to a boiling pot in the kitchen.
PETA provides the following information about lobsters: According to Dr. Jaren G. Horsley, an invertebrate zoologist, lobsters have a "sophisticated nervous system" and feel "a great deal of pain" when they are cut or cooked alive. And because lobsters do not enter a state of shock when they are hurt, they feel every moment of their slow, painful deaths when they are cooked in a pot of boiling water. Dr. Nedim C. Buyukmihci, a professor of veterinary surgery, writes, "There is no question that lobsters have the ability to feel pain and suffer. ... [I]t would be inappropriate to do something to lobsters that you would not consider doing to conscious dogs, cats, or humans."
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