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.
*****
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.
