Over this past weekend, I spent my time at a friend’s place cooking 20+ chilli crabs over 2 days on request. We also barbequed some lamb chops, chicken wings and prawns but mainly, the thing we were all there for was chilli crabs.

Now, the last time we cooked it, the crabs were all dead so we didn’t have to do any messy stuff. This time round though, things were different as I opted for the live mud crabs available at my friendly local fishmonger. Immediately I’m reminded of my grandmother wielding a single chopstick and stabbing hard and firm into the centre of many many crabs that struggled for a couple of minutes before fading away. I suppose I always felt a strange pang of excitement at simply eating the tasty morsels, steamed to perfection. Never did I think about the karmic consequences of it all.

Saturday was round one. I chopped shit up while my mate did the business. Sunday, we would swop jobs. The crabs tend to keep quiet for the most bit. Until you pick them up and unfurl the paper that surrounds them, that’s when they start to wiggle their legs and struggle. when you place them down into the sink, shellside down, you sense their fear. The serrated steak knife we picked for the job looked suitably vicious. All toothy and sharp. What I did was basically hold its torso, with its legs flailing around, trying to cling onto my hand somehow as I stared it right in the face. Reason being that would be my initial point of entry. We’d decided beforehand that it would be a 2 stab process.

Bam! In the face! The sad bit is when he (it was a male crab) sort of twitched his eye and his flailing got weaker and weaker. I sort of wish I could have let him go sooner, faster. But it wasn’t to be. It must’ve been quite agonising getting stabbed in the face and left to die. Yet, I compounded his misery by lifting his butt flap and stabbing him in the abdomen a second time, hoping that it would conclude things faster. It did I think, to some extent, maybe reducing his life expectancy by another 10 seconds. Surely a good thing at that point?

A day earlier, my friend suffered slight conscience pangs when he ripped them apart and the limbs still moved. Whether through rigor mortis or otherwise, I wasn’t concerned about the whys. Instead, I made sure they were completely limp before proceeding to dismember them. I remember also, the time when we killed lobsters. The difference then was we sort of put em to sleep before planting them down and slicing them in between the eyes in one fatal move. The crab had to have me wanting to murder it, to take its life to fuel my own as well as my appetite.

Now I know lots of people simply put crabs into a pot and boil/steam them alive. But they struggle a lot when you do and the limbs fall off and shit. I don’t like the idea of all the innards and dead man’s fingers left to cook with the crabs in the pot. I’d rather take it apart then cook it after it has been cleaned. It also seems like a worse fate, dying over the course of half an hour in a death sauna. The benefit of doing so means you don’t have to watch them die, which is somewhat hypocritical. I opted to face the choice I was making head on, which was simply evil and readily admitting to it. I wished them a quick death. Perhaps I needed to cleave them between the eyee. I just wished the executions could be instantaneous I suppose.

Why do I need that? Because I can easily see myself doing it again. Crab, Lobster, Fish, Chicken… I’ll kill them all if it means they end up on the plates of my acquaintances. I might be offended by my own actions to a certain extent but I do it for a reason. Perhaps I could sustain myself amply with vegetables and comfort myself with the idea that my life goes on without hurting anything. But plants can’t scream at a frequency audible to human ears. If they could as you pluck them out of the ground, would you stop eating them?

Cue lengthy discussion on cannibalism, euthanasia, vegans and globalization. We’re all hypocrites and we all need to live. Fuck civilization and establishment. Fuck thinking that we’re more than the animals we are. Fuck thinking that one way of living is better than another. Because, at the end of the day, you, me, the crab, we’re all the same.

Preserving life is a complicated business. Something I really understand now, reminded by the look in that crab’s eyes. I am grateful to him. Grateful to all the chickens, cows and carrots that have died to keep me alive. At least I can say, I made use of them to their fullest potential.

If you have to kill anything, at least make sure it tastes good.