Photo by Christopher McLallen/Millennium Images, UK

I need you to inhabit the mind and spirit of a lobster: you have been fished from your tank and hurled like a frisbee into the English Channel. Spinning, disoriented, delirious, bewildered, dazed, dizzy, giddy… free? “ Thalassa! Thalassa! ” Greek mercenaries shouted when they finally saw the Black Sea in 401 BC, proof that they were nearly home from a perilous and long campaign in Persia. For a brief moment, did the lobster feel such triumphant, anthropomorphic relief? The sea, the sea… And then bang – contact with the water, dead on impact.

Domesticated lobsters, you see, are not used to such vertiginous temperature shocks, and therefore the intervention probably proved fatal. I know this because I have been closely following a case of lobster homicide.…