Woman Receives PETA Award After Doral Bar Removes Lobster Zone Machine

Concerned Citizen Convinces Pub Owner That Cruel Contraptions Cause Suffering

For Immediate Release:
August 5, 2013

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382   

Doral, Fla. — For meeting with and persuading the owner of the Carolina Ale House in Doral to get rid of the establishment’s cruel Lobster Zone “game,” Palmetto Bay resident Cristina Fernandez has been given a Lobster Defender Award from PETA.

“Cristina is a shining example of how simply speaking up can help stop animal suffering,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Whether the lobsters who are caught are taken to the kitchen or returned to the tank to be tormented anew, these cruel devices belong in the book of bad ideas.”

The Lobster Zone is a tank that holds live lobsters, and customers can pay to swing a mechanical claw that grabs at them. Lobsters trapped in Lobster Zone machines are sometimes injured by the claw, and they are given no food because it’s industry policy not to feed them while they’re awaiting their death. When a customer drags a lobster out of the tank, the animal is boiled alive and eaten.

Lobsters have been known to live for more than 125 years in the ocean, and they can travel more than 100 miles each year. They have sophisticated nervous systems and are capable of experiencing pain and suffering. Lobsters kept in tanks and shipped on ice suffer from stress associated with confinement, low oxygen levels, severe crowding, and hunger.

According to Dr. Jaren G. Horsley, an invertebrate zoologist, lobsters have a “sophisticated nervous system” and feel “a great deal of pain” when they’re cut open or cooked alive. And because lobsters don’t enter a state of shock when they’re hurt, they feel every moment of their slow, painful deaths when cooked in a pot of boiling water.

Fernandez will receive a congratulatory note and a framed certificate.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.

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