With signs reading save the lobsters and the clams and the oysters.

I really don’t care for seafood and I am in fact unable to eat most of the denizens that lurk about on the ocean floor because I am allergic to them. It has nothing to do with the fact that have way too many legs and antennas and such and look like the creature from the “Alien” movies.

But I have always thought that it was kind of weird that you could go into a supermarket, even the smallest of markets that sells meat, canned goods, motor oil and lottery tickets and find a tank full of live lobsters. Where else can you go and pick out your dinner while it’s still living?

Can you imagine the crying from the animal activists if you could pick out your steak on the hoof? “I’ll take the cute heifer with the brown eyes” and then wait for the gunshot out back?

No it would ever happen.

And now it looks like at least in one supermarket chain you may not be able to pick out a live Larry the lobster or even Ollie the oyster or Carol the clam.

The Whole Food Market chain which was founded in 1980 as one small store in Austin, Texas, and is now the world’s leading retailer of natural and organic foods, with 184 stores in North America and the United Kingdom. The food chain has decided that they have been torturing the live seafood that they have selling and they are doing something about it.

Last month they stopped selling live soft shell crabs because of concerns for the quality of the life of the many legged things. Now they are building lobster condos for those about to dropped into boiling water with special little lobster sized rooms and dim lighting so kids aren’t as likely to tap on the glass and rile them up.

The truth of this deal is that lobsters have the nervous system of an insect, can’t really see that well anyway and there is no evidence to suggest that they can suffer.

A marine biologist in Maine where lobster rolls are sold in McDonald’s says they can move away from harmful stimuli but there is nothing that suggests they can suffer which requires an emotional component. How would you know that by looking at a lobster? Oh look honey that lobster is smiling?

Huh?

One time someone who I assume had no idea of my feelings about crustaceans sent me a live Maine lobster. I opened the box, not knowing what was in it and this thing crawled out. I stomped on it screaming.

One thing in that room was feeling pain.