I love to get in a hot tub and gradually turn up the temp to dangerous levels. It’s not painful… it’s dangerously comforting. I only read the article not the study, but I wonder if the study examined the effect of slow boiling (like the euphamism “boiling frogs”).

The article has this:

This is awful, but what can we do?

The first step is acknowledging that these animals might experience pain similarly to how we do.

With that understanding, industries and regulators can work towards implementing more humane methods of handling and killing crustaceans.

Restaurants and home cooks alike can adjust. Rapid chilling at 32 °F for 20 minutes puts many crabs into torpor; specialized devices such as the CrustaStun deliver a quick electrical jolt that ends consciousness in under a second.

So it makes sense that a restaurant would use a commercial device to do it quickly. And I guess most home cooks are buying dead crustaceans. But some grocers have a tank of live ones. I have never bought seafood like that. Do they give it to you live or do they kill it in the store before purchase?

The ultimate question is whether consumers “need” to toss these animals into boiling water, or if they can put them in moderate water and slowly bring it to a boil. Or if the research shows that it’s relatively painless.