During the month of August I helped to care for two fine specimens of Felis catus named Cecil and Tank Girl. Their human counterpart, a Stanford professor I’ll call Cat Person (the felines won’t object to my leaving their names unchanged), noted in her instructions that Cecil was the more "circumspect" of the two, while Tank was a natural born killer. I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Tank made a hobby of bisecting prey as small as mice and as large as squirrels, so that their body cavities, ribbed and empty, resembled miniature concert halls. 
"For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance," wrote Christopher Smart of his famous cat, Jeoffrey, in Jubilate Agno. I’m not sure this kindness was in Tank’s repertoire, and I know it isn’t in mine. When I boil a lobster alive, for instance, I don’t give it water wings or a tiny rope ladder. I don’t even remove its rubber bands. Perhaps that explains why I’ve never experienced the ghastliness the late David Foster Wallace described in his now well-known essay "Consider the Lobster," first published in Gourmet magazine and later reproduced in a collection of the same title:
Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming).
I grew up a fan of David Foster Wallace, in particular Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I also grew up with cats. It’s unlikely that DFW, as fans are wont to call him, never owned a pet, or that he never accidentally tuned in to a nature program, but you’d never guess either to read his essay. In all his characteristically rambling meditations on whether it’s "all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure," one thing is never so much as acknowledged: Plenty of animals feed on other animals. Birds do it, bees do it-well, no, bees don’t do it, but fleas educated and otherwise certainly do. Let’s do it, let’s- Consider the tarantula. According to The Tarantula Keeper’s Guide, by Stanley and Marguerite Schultz, "tarantulas regurgitate digestive fluids while masticating their prey. All of this is diluted by fluid from the coxal glands. The resulting, partially digested, liquid concoction is draw up through the mouth, over the palate plate in the pharynx and through the esophagus . . . in much the same way that humans use the back of their throats when sipping a drink through a soda straw."
I, for one, would pick boiling water over that; over being digested whole, very slowly, by a large snake; over being bitten in two by a Carcharadon carcharias (you know him as Jaws); over many of nature’s various and imaginative unhappy endings.
Another question Wallace doesn’t answer is: Is it wrong to boil a lobster because it’s wrong to kill anything in any way, or because it’s wrong to cause pain? The latter seems to be taken for granted; it must be, because Wallace’s fascinating digressions about what a lobster can feel-his poetry of "nociceptors and prostaglandins"-and the distinction between mere "painful stimuli" and "experiencing painful stimuli as unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on" would otherwise be irrelevant. I hope it’s needless to say that there’s something dangerous in considering culpability directly proportional to pain inflicted, though I suppose our legal system in some cases operates on that principle, as a deterrent to torture.
So, as I have pointed out, animals do it. Animals eat animals, and inflict terrible pain in so doing. And aren’t we animals, too? This is probably why animal rights advocacy rubs many people, as voluntary members of the order Carnivora, the wrong way. (I must note here that Wallace is not really among their number, and readily admits to loving meat.) You adore the majestic Siberian tiger, and in return all it does is lick its chops. You devote your life to Ursus arctos horribilis, and, well, rent Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man if you don’t know how that love affair ends up.
There is an obvious objection to this line of thinking-this line of thinking that the genius DFW didn’t think worth contemplating-and the reader is now waving his hand frantically at the back of the classroom: We alone can "consider" the lobster. It is our unique privilege to think about the suffering we cause, and if we are truly honest rather than merely hungry, merely inconvenienced by our urges, we will conclude that we have scant justification for causing it. Our brains put us above the most fearsome apex predators, but with gray matter comes great responsibility.
Here’s something else to consider. When the documentary Lake of Fire, which shows footage of abortions, came out in 2006, there was talk that it was propaganda. One reviewer, who deemed the film "manipulation," wrote, "Not content to document fetal tissue being suctioned out of a woman’s vagina, [director Tony Kaye] proceeds to film, in extreme close-up, the sifting of the material, revealing a tiny eye, a minuscule foot. No interviews with medical personnel are provided to explain what, exactly, is happening." Yes, we need an expert to explain what we’re seeing. Does it hurt?
Animals eat animals; some even eat their own young. But Wallace’s essay gives no indication that he’d have looked to the animal kingdom for a reliable guide to what human beings should and shouldn’t do. Permit me to pose an impolite question. If pain genuinely exercised DFW’s moral imagination, why didn’t he look for it a little bit closer to home? One answer is that a food magazine never asked him to. Another is that it’s easier and more fun to play intellectual games with a bug-DFW himself tells us that the locals call lobsters, which are arthropods, by this name-than to ask moral questions about those "bugs" that look just like we do. Whatever conclusions one reaches about the meaning or relevance (legal, moral, or otherwise) of their pain (or non-pain), it must command at least as much attention as the scrabblings of two red claws in a pot. Something is lacking in the reader who sees the operation of a great philosophical mind in this least urgent of problems, and something blinkered in the mind that ponders it without sensing how near he is to a weightier and worthier subject. The abolitionists might as well have concerned themselves with the subjugation of pack animals.
Further, the question of pain, which affords an intriguing discussion of brain and nervous system development-and which is the only important question in the case of certain small and tasty marine life-is a rather poor "critical apparatus" for approaching human beings. Pain, even in its most "unbearable" incarnations, is fleeting, but extinction is forever.