Is It OK To Hunt Lobsters? August 8, 2011 by lukesheppard

Is it fair to catch Lobsters whilst scuba diving? I believe not, although I suspect many will disagree with me. But here is my thinking… We don maybe £500 to £1000 worth of kit, learn to dive then use this very clever machinery to allow us to remain underwater for extended periods to give us plenty of time to coax the lobster out of it’s hiding hole. Did the lobster get any assistance from technology? Nope. So to even things up maybe Lobsters should be armed with a Vickers machine gun (as luck would have it, it’s a water cooled relic from the war). Ok, let’s be a little more serious; why is it ok to catch and kill crustacean but not fish? I know underwater hunting is a big thing nowadays (although not mine but each to his or her own) but where is the line of acceptability?

We work closely with Bite Back to stop shark finning, now I doubt and hope no one reading this condones shark finning. Since finning is done for food we cannot use the argument that we catch lobsters for food as the same could be said of finning. I agree part of the reason I find finning so abhorrent is they could kill the shark first then cut the fins off to save the suffering if they really insist to eating fins. For the record I totally disagree with killing sharks for any lifestyle reason. So back to lobsters, why don’t they warrant some of our undersea love? Is it because they are not very pretty? No block buster movies ever made about a lobster (maybe I should try and come up with a script and pitch it on Dragons Den?!) I could go down in history as the man who changed the worlds view on lobsters!

I do have one caveat to all this. For some reason I think if you breath hold and snorkel down and catch a lobsters that is fine. It’s a fair fight of man against lobster, no use of technology to give us the huge advantage scuba equipment does. Maybe that alone is a bit like saying we should not use the tools the human race has developed, that have ultimately given us domination of the whole planet. So is it okay to catch lobsters? Or can you come up with a story line for my lobster blockbuster to be (“Snip”)?