sorry for so many posts:
the two sides of lobster liberation movement, PETA vs Consumers
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm?headline=2743
• Lobsters can attain a high degree of associative learning and can make distinctions about their environment. They can learn to associate certain chemical signals with punishments and others with rewards.
• Lobsters have memories. They explore new environments but not ones that they’ve previously explored. They form stable social hierarchies, and they can remember and recognize individuals whom they have fought with in the past.
• Lobsters can make generalizations. They can associate an individual odor with a mixture that contains it, perhaps using higher-order processing such as “configural discrimination,†which means that they can discern that a combination is not the same thing as the sum of its parts.
• Measurements of brain activity in the closely related crayfish show that their brains respond differently to interesting or irrelevant objects. Their brains also show “expectation,†which in humans is considered to be a sign of higher mental processing, associated with conscious experiences.
• Lobsters subjected to harmful events, such as electric shocks, respond similarly to the way that mammals react to pain. Experiments on crustaceans commonly assume that electric shocks are painful and use them as aversive stimuli.
• The nervous systems of lobsters and crabs produce opioids, which in mammals are chemicals that mediate pain. They also possess opioid receptors, which appear to function the same way as in other animals. Studies in crabs show that their defensive reaction to electric shocks or to being struck is reduced by morphine, that this effect is dose-dependent, and that the effect can be counteracted by naloxone, an opioid antagonist, as is also the case in mammals. It is implausible that lobsters would have pain-mediating chemicals and receptors and respond to painkillers just as other animals do if they could not feel pain.
"...last year a contingent from the terrorist Animal Liberation Front (ALF) snuck into the parking lot of a Chicago seafood distributor and cut the four brake lines on all but two of the company's 40-truck fleet. That attack endangered not only live lobsters, but also the human drivers -- not that PETA makes any distinction.
PETA's official position on attacks like this one is best summed up by PETA president Ingrid Newkirk, who has told the New York Daily News: "I will be the last person to condemn ALF."