Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When it’s time to cook a lobster, the crustaceans are infamously boiled alive. While one can safely assume that such an end would be excruciating for a human, crustaceans’ capacity for feeling pain is a bit vague. The picture is slowly clarifying, however. And it’s not pretty.  Given that a growing number of countries have banned the boiling of live crustaceans, the fishing industry is looking into the possibility of stunning them with electric shocks, which could be extremely painful.  Within this context, a team of researchers in Norway investigated how humane this slaughter method really is—with troubling results. Simply put, the team studied Norway lobsters (Nephrops norvegicus) getting electrocuted in water. The animals tried to flee by flipping their tails quickly. However, lobsters on two different common painkillers flipped their tails less or not at all. This outcome suggests that the drugs relieve pain—which hints that they can  feel pain in the first place.  “Humans tend to empathise …