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Chinese sell live crabs through vending machines
Image capture from youtube.com video "Living in a Vending Machine FAIL"
Asians are known to treat animals quiet differently than Europeans or Americans do. But their latest invention really gives me the creeps. Hungry commuters can now grab live crabs from vending machines on their way home.
In the municipality of Nanjing in China crab dishes are already very popular. With the vending machines, the Twin Lake Crab Company, a big crab seller in China, wants to make crab more easily available to consumers. A living crab from the vending machines costs between € 2 and € 6 (between $ 3 and $ 9) depending on the size of the crab (small, medium or large). The vending machines keep their temperature steady at 5 degrees Celsius, sedating the crabs without killing them. The crabs are sold in transparent plastic boxes, just big enough to hold them.
The vending machines are located in a number of metro stations in Nanjing and the company is looking for expansion throughout China. Although sales were slow at first (consumers had a hard time believing the crabs where alive in the vending machines) sales have started to pick up. Hundreds of crabs are being sold through the machines on a daily basis.
Look at the video below to see for yourself how cruel we humans sometimes are.
Tags: China, chinese crabs, consumption, crab, crab sales, live crabs in vending machines, vending machines
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Hi The Smoke,
I agree with you, the West is no better than the East. Cultural differences make us find some things more shocking that others, maybe the biggest issue is that in the West factory farms go great lengths to hide the processing of live animals from us, while in the East they just but it out there, even in vending machines.
This is definitely weird and not very nice to say the least, but having grown up in Maryland where people regularly boil crabs alive I don’t know if Asia any more cruel towards animals than the West. Of course there there are the shocking videos of dogs being skinned alive in China. Then again we have the way pigs and calves are treated in US factory farms. Kind of rotten in both the East and West, I think.