“OH THE HUMANITY! I mean…well, you know what I mean…”
A good friend related this scene on Facebook, and asks if she is losing her mind:
She was shopping at the open air fish market on Maine Avenue in Washington, D.C. when a vendor, whose cart was full of live blue crabs, had an escape attempt. One of the crustaceans made a dash for freedom, only to be squashed by the wheel of the cart. “I screamed and then burst into tears,” she wrote. “It was awful. I tried to save the little guy.” Then she realized that people were laughing at the drama, thinking it was a comedy….laughing at the crab getting crushed and at my friend for being upset by it.
She wrote: “Now I know he was destined for a pot of boiling water. But somehow – seeing that little creature getting run over was just too much for me. I know someone was going to eat that crab – but do we have to be cruel?”
Your Post-Mothers Day Ethics Quiz for crab mothers everywhere:
Were the laughers cruel, or merely recognizing a funny scene when they saw one?
I find this scenario surprisingly stimulating.
Let’s stipulate that its is always inconsiderate to laugh at someone in distress, no matter who they are, or why they are unhappy. This is easy Golden Rule territory. Mocking someone because they are distraught about something you couldn’t care less about epitomizes the self-centered mindset that is death to ethics alarms.
I must add, however, that I can conceive of extremes of distress over the crab’s untimely demise that might compel laughter even from the most sensitive among us. Imagine a PETA fanatic cradling the dying crab in her arms and crying to the heavens, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” as in every cheesy action movie since 1997. Or re-enacting the last scene in “King Lear,” howling as he or she carries a stilled crab-Cordelia. I think someone trying to use CPR on a cracked crab would be awfully hard not to laugh at. Desperately trying to reassemble the dead crab’s severed legs and claws, maybe with duct tape, while screaming, “LIVE, damn you! I won’t let you die!!!”—I might have a hard time not laughing at that.
The tougher issue, which I think is what my friend was talking about, is whether laughing at the crab’s fate, rather than its mourner’s expression of sorrow, is cruel. My wife inherited a particularly strong family strain of the animal sensitivity gene, which causes her to remove icky spiders and disgusting beetles from the house to the safety of the garden. On occasion she has shed a tear over the demise of a mouse, a tiny lizard, or a worm. She believes any kind of mirth expressed at the death of a living thing is a sure sign of future serial killing sprees, so I am obliged not to brush off objections to the laughers on Maine Ave. with the words, “Oh, come on. It’s just a crab!” I also agree that laughing at the death of anything, including a rat or Osama bin Laden, is a sign of a particularly ugly streak of callousness that cannot be conducive to ethical conduct generally.
The crab, however, was almost certainly destined for an even worse death, being boiled alive. I could understand a bystander applauding the pluck of a crab determined to perish on his own terms, escaping only to hurl himself under the deadly wheel of a juggernaut. It does not seem, however, from the account, that the laughter was prompted by joy at the crab’s successful effort to plot his own demise. No, if they were laughing at the crab being crushed, they would probably laugh at him being boiled to death too.
I think that’s gratuitously cruel. The people who would feel sorry for the crab are better bets to have good ethical instincts than the people who laughed.
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Graphic: Wallpaper4me
Ethics Alarms 
I have tears streaming down my face at this very moment. However, I’m not sure if I’m laughing or crying…
But do you have a craving for crab?
I do! In fact, I now realize I haven’t patronized Joe’s Crab Shack for too long. Yummy.
Betting, on who has the better ethical instincts, based on observations of emotional responses to random events…now, that just might be unethical…
Oh, I don’t think so at all. Emotional responses are what silence ethics alarms…they are a terrific indicator of ethical instincts.
It’s only the betting I’m knocking; I don’t mean to suggest not observing for evidence to draw conclusions. Betting is on a slope to…religious.
She’s clearly an idiot, and these people that laughed must always be idiots, which pretty much confirms that Washington D.C, is full of idiots. a living animal being crushed under a persons car must be a brutal sight to behold, cracking and busting everywhere! Anyone finding the humour in such an event is clearly sick, as such a sight would upset most, regardless of if they enjoyed eating meat or not. Barbaric deaths aren’t much fun, unless you’re a Roman, living in 30BC.
always* I meant to say, also, clearly I too am an idiot! ha!
It hit me while watching “Platoon” 20 years ago. There was that terrible scene where one soldier used the butt of his gun to crush the face of the vietnamese kid. I heard some male lowlife’s in the theater start to guffaw. At first I thought “these frigging troglodytes…..” But after some consideration, I thought “maybe these are men who have been conditioned to hold back tears over sadness and fear, and they don’t have it in them to display sadness…but they do have a nervous reaction. Sadly it comes out as a laugh, which makes them appear like complete “aholes” without any sympathy for their fellow man. I wonder if that’s not what was at work in the audience.
It’s a good insight…I see it in the theater all the time: laughter as a cover for other emotions.
Or they found the act of crushing the kids face in a MOVIE so outrageous they laughed at it. I got asked to leave a showing of Young Guns when it first came out becuase a friend and I were laughing at the violence . To us the outrageous violence was no different then the violence in the Three Stooges. We recognized both as fake and artificial .
Crabs are bugs. Nobody would cry if she’d ran over a giant cockroach, now would they?
1. Crabs are not bugs.
2. And yes, there are people who get emotional over the ending of any life, no matter how lowly.
3. Forced to choose, I would always feel safer with someone who errs on the side of life rather than the side of death. There are those among us, you know, who regard some human beings as “bugs.”
They have exoskeletons and they’re similar to bugs. Close enough in my book. I’ll still eat them. Humans are, after all, omnivores. And I’m sure there are people who thing we’re insects. Who cares. I happen to think we’re all just animals. I will eat meat and when the world starts to fall apart, the zombies are out, I will eat my neighbor’s dog if I have to. And maybe my neighbor too. I hear we taste like chicken 😀
It’s truly an honor to have the famous Lawrence Talbot posting comments here.
I was taught that you respect ALL life and you shouldnt inflict unessersary harm on an animal. So while I do enjoy a good crab boil, hell you have to cook them, I wouldnt stomp on a crab just for the hell of it. Although I did once put a crawfish down on the ground to see what my friends bull mastiff would do with it. Amazingly the mastiff lost. lol
That would have been my bet. I love bull mastiffs.
Well, I wouldn’t intentionally squash a crab either. But I’m not going to flop down and cry over an accidental squashing.