Blogger Mark Mallett recently quoted a news story that reported on a newfound compassion and concern for babies in their mothers’ wombs lobsters: 
The CrustaStun, billed as a more humane way to kill lobsters, was originally launched with a home and restaurant version in 1999 by British inventor Simon Buckhaven. Buckhaven says the shock makes lobsters insensible for pain-free boiling… “There were pressures on them from upscale dining room and grocery chains in the U.K. and London to humanely process seafood.”
(Working in Chicago, this story prompted me to call to mind the city council’s decision earlier this year to ban the sale of foie gras in the city’s restaurants.) Mark Shea’s analysis, as usual, is spot-on:
Sin Doesn’t Just Make You Stupid. In [its] extreme forms, it makes you crazy That’s why a culture that murders 1.5 million of its kids each year and struggles to preserve the God-given right to stick scissors in a baby’s brain obsesses over how to mercifully kill a lobster. I think it’s displacement: “Oh, but I’m not an inhuman monster! Sure, I approve of sticking scissors in a baby’s brain. But look how tenderly I fret about lobsters! I’m really quite a lovely person!”
Chesterton summed up the insanity almost 100 years ago in his book All Things Considered:
Meanwhile, it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey this Christmas; and it is not in the least true (as the vegetarians say) that I shall do it because I do not realise what I am doing, or because I do what I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or a fundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what I am doing; in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do. Scrooge and the Cratchits and I are, as I have said, all in one boat; the turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in the night, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well; but it is really practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. I can avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificial tormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun or sticking knives in him for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly and killing him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in his own solemn eyes his own strange and separate destiny… In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means.
