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PETA sues Maine Lobster Festival over steaming of 20,000 live lobsters

The animal rights organization called the traditional way of cooking lobster animal cruelty because lobsters can feel pain, according to some scientific research.

PETA filed a lawsuit against the Maine Lobster Festival ahead of its 2025 event. Michael Whitman Photography

July 29, 2025

2 minutes to read

Animal welfare organization PETA has filed a lawsuit against the Maine Lobster Festival and the City of Rockland in an attempt to stop the steaming of more than 20,000 live lobsters at the event this week.

Animals

The Portland Press Herald reported that PETA’s complaint was filed July 24 in Knox County Superior Court, in which the group describes the event as “a municipally-endorsed spectacle of animal suffering.”

The group alleged that the festival, which is nearly eight decades old, and the city where it’s held is violating Maine’s animal cruelty statutes in a public park because of the way lobsters are cooked at the event, traditionally steamed while still alive.

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The basis of PETA’s complaint is more recent research that shows lobsters can feel pain, including a study out of the London School of Economics and Political Science that looked at the way a lobster’s nervous system responds to pain and distress.

“There’s evidence that a lobster will carry on living for two to three minutes when it’s dropped into a pan of boiling water and that the nervous system response carries on very intensely during that time, just as it would with you or me or a cat or a dog or any animal dropped into a pan of boiling water,” said Dr. Jonathan Birch, who led the study that was published in 2021, on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Some countries have even moved to make the traditional method of cooking live lobsters illegal, and instead have pushed for stunning or quickly killing the lobster before steaming it.

But despite this study and other research, much of the existing, mainstream science has long believed that lobsters can’t feel pain.

Rick Wahle, a lobster biologist in Maine, told the Press Herald that the matter is “controversial” and that “actual pain receptors have yet to be found” in the crustacean.

In response to the lawsuit, the festival organizers told the Portland newspaper that they were sticking to the current science in “using traditional, lawful, and widely accepted cooking methods.”

PETA said the group doesn’t expect its lawsuit to change this year’s festivities, which take place July 30 through Aug. 3, but they hope it’s “the last Maine Lobster Festival in which lobsters are tortured to death.”