Thank you PETA, for your protest has once again... Follow

... made me hungry by showing me new and entertaining ways to eat tasty animals. I had never heared of this before now, and whoever thought it up is a frigging genious! I for one plan on locating one of these devices and using it as soon as possible!

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_9725577


Don't play with food, PETA says
By Al Lewis
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 06/27/2008 11:59:30 PM MDT


You can play pool, foosball, shuffleboard, darts and video games at J.D.'s Bait Shop, a sports bar and grill on Arapahoe Road just east of Interstate 25.

Or play "The Lobster Zone."

It's just like those games where you guide a claw toward a plush toy in a glass box, only instead of stuffed animals, you are going for live lobsters. It costs $2 per try, and if you snag a lobster, the kitchen will fix it right up for you.

"You have it with some fries and some slaw, and you are done," said Dennis McCann, who has run this popular southeast Denver-area watering hole for 13 years.

McCann, however, had been thinking about removing this novelty machine after one of his customers complained. Apparently, she didn't find the irony of clawing a live lobster amusing.

Then last week came a letter from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asking him to stop. PETA also put out a news release:

"JD's Lobster Zone machine turns torture and death into a game, pure and simple," says PETA vice president Tracy Reiman. "Incarcerating lobsters in filthy tanks inside a boisterous club, making an abusive game out of their capture, and finally boiling them to death is every bit as reprehensible as tormenting cats, dogs, or any other animal."

When I called PETA spokeswoman Nicole Matthews, she was unaware that J.D.'s Bait Shop was just one of The Lobster Zone's many customers.

Kris Volk, the Colorado distributor for the game, told me it's played in a dozen other Denver-area restaurants. And Ernie Pappas, owner of the Apopka, Fla.-based company, told me his Lobster Zone is in more than 300 locations nationwide.

It's been around for more than a decade, said Pappas, who hired a marine biologist to develop the tanks on his machines.

There are competitors making lobster games, too. The "Love Maine Lobster Claw Game," for example, boasts that its $15,950 machines can net $10,000 a year.

Pappas told me his games do not generate many complaints.

"If a restaurant does 8,000 (customers) a week, we might get one person every other week who complains," he said.

The sad fact is, lobsters' fates are sealed once they fall into human hands. Often, they are boiled or cut apart while still alive.

At Denver's Oceanaire restaurant, they are stabbed in the head, which is possibly the quickest, most painless way to go.

"Once a lobster dies, it starts to deteriorate much faster than normal seafood," said Matt Mine, executive chef at the Oceanaire.

PETA's website LobsterLib.com argues there's no humane way to kill lobsters, so we really shouldn't eat them at all. Ideally, we should be vegetarians, too.

Lobsters, however, are not vegetarians. "Lobsters' favorite food is lobster," said Pappas.

Despite PETA's agitating, McCann told me his Lobster Zone was still up and running. And now that PETA is on his case, he just might keep it.

"I just hate like hell for somebody to tell me how to run my business," he said.

Denver restaurant consultant and vegetarian John Imbergamo said he doubts any controversy that PETA generates will turn people away from J.D.'s Bait Shop.

"It's not exactly a place that's sprout- and tofu-friendly," he said.

If anything, the kind of people who would be curious about this game might hear the publicity and go there, Imbergamo said.

"I still don't think it's a good idea," he said. "It's not good to use live things in games. Animals deserve some kind of humane treatment."

I, for one, do not see the difference between grabbing a lobster with a mechanical claw or pair of tongs, or prodding it with a rake or a stick until you can grab it with your hands.

I went by J.D.'s on Thursday night and found eight lobsters, peacefully spread out in as pristine a tank as I'd seen anywhere. Nobody played during the two hours I was there.

If you are a lobster, this has got to be one of the safest places, I told the bartender.

Do you know how hard it is to snag a stuffed animal in a claw machine? You can go through a whole roll of quarters and never get one.

"At a (seafood) restaurant, you point out which lobster (in the tank) you want, and that's it," bartender Robert Jefferson said. "This way, they have a sporting chance."

Hmm, I don't even like lobster but I want to find that place and try my luck. I'm glad that PETA was kind enough to bring this particularly entertaining dinner option to my attention.

I see that someone has been studying his Good Eats episodes again.

If there is any reason to go visit my father-in-law in Denver, this is it.

This is why I hate vegetarians.

OK was I the only one who read this thread title and instantly thought of PETA and naked models?

...

But then thought meh, Kao is the thread author. It's probably about airplanes.

The problem of course is that to them no matter what you do to an animal is inhumane. Don't they also argue that you shouldn't even own pets?(even if they get much better treatment than nature can give) or is that one of the other crazy animal rights groups?

Either way this made me want to eat some seafood.. but now I want to catch it with a claw!