To the Editor:

How cute does an animal need to be for us to care about its suffering? If most of us noticed a litter of puppies crowded in a tiny cage on the side of the road, we would come to their immediate aid. But what if those puppies were lobsters? And rather than the side of the road, what if we routinely saw them crammed into supermarket tanks?

This sight, no matter how normalized, should disgust and enrage us.

It is natural to become desensitized to the abuse most animals suffer in faraway factory farms, but grocery stores furnish us with a pane of glass through which we can observe lobsters crawling atop each other, stressed beyond imagination, in water choked with their own waste.

I can already hear the indignant rebuttals: “But lobsters don’t feel pain.” (Of course they do. Their decentralized nervous systems cannot put them into a state of shock, and certain of their opioid receptors share 100 percent sequence identity with human counterparts.) “Lobsters have natural predators and would die in the wild too.” (Instantaneous death in the wild would be mercy compared to the weeks of torment they experience in stores.) “So are we just not supposed to eat lobsters?” (Yes. Stop eating animals.)

I am calling upon consumers, legislators, and the food industry to rectify this injustice. Lobsters do not deserve torture for the crime of looking less cute than puppies.

Christine O’Neill

Wolcott