Atlantic Lobster Lobbing

 Note: all the factual material for this column was gleaned from a Fox News article that also cites two British news sources, the Daily Mail and the Yorkshire Post.  The opinions that follow, however, are solely my own, independent of those media outlets.

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Fishermen off the Northern English Coast have been finding a lot of Canadian lobsters in their nets recently.  The lobsters are not native to those waters and, in fact, live off the Canadian Coast some 3,500 miles distant.  How did they get all the way to England?, you ask.  Well, one big clue is that many of them have rubber bands attached to their pincers.  That would indicate that they were netted near the Canadian Coast and were intended for someone's dinner table.

The supposition is that passengers aboard Atlantic-crossing cruise ships have been busy buying the crustaceans and then throwing them overboard as the ship approaches jolly old England. It is a probably a misguided mission to 'save' the creatures. 

Of course, there are two salient facts that prove the practice to be fruitless - or should I say 'lobster-less'.  First, the lobsters are not the same breed as their counterparts in those waters, so they cannot "...be fruitful and multiply."   And second, leaving the bands around their pincers disables their hunting and eating opportunities, so they soon starve to death, unless caught by those pesky English fishermen for eating enjoyment on their own dinner tables.

There are other bad implications involved with the transport and tossing of contraband crustaceans.  Among them are the transmittal of North American lobster disease to their distant cousins in Europe; possibly a payback for the diseases that the European settlers gave to the Native Americans a few hundred years ago, but on a smaller scale.

I really liked what one fishing industry spokesman had to say on the subject of lobster littering. “They won’t last much longer than if the passengers had eaten them for dinner.” He also proclaimed that they were "cheap Canadian lobster", so I guess the English are not so fond of them after all.

Now, if we could just round up some of those feckless fish-freedom fighters, those seafaring seafood saviors, I think they would be marvelous candidates for the 2014 Darwin Award.  I know, they didn't die in the act, but their refusal to dine on one of nature's prime culinary crustaceans surely qualifies them as bottom breeders themselves and prone to early extinction.

And now, a poem for the occasion...

The lobster is a tasty food,

They look so cool and taste so good.

They boil to red from blue real quick,

But 'seasoned' wrong, they make you sick.

Post Script - My dear wife says that I will probably piss off some people with this column, because they won't understand the irony or sarcasm.  However, rest assured that I had my tongue firmly planted in my cheek the entire time I was typing, and my use of alliteration should give it away as well.  If you found it funny, feel free to forward it to friends and family.