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“How is that not a community guideline violation? I feel like I just watched a crime.” That’s what TikTok user @werty1627 said when she posted her response to the latest viral TikTok that spawned countless reaction videos and stitches (where users clip parts of other creator’s videos into their own). 

In this one, a woman whose screen name is Chels is making typical recipe content. It starts out uneventfully, her chirpy voiceover narrating the action in the style you come to expect from such material. “Y’all let’s make a crab boil in the air fryer…”

You see her hands, clad in blue plastic gloves adding potatoes and corn to the bowl of a glass air fryer. But that’s where the fun ends and the video takes a turn. 

She adds two live Maryland blue crabs to the bowl and proceeds to dump enough seasoning on them to colour the whole dish orange. She then states that she turned the air fryer on to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 C) and cooked them for 15 minutes while she looked on. 

She goes on to sheepishly say, “Do not knock it until you try it. It was sad watching them kinda…you know. But these crabs came out so good and juicy. I was not expecting them to come out this good.” 

But the internet disagrees. The overwhelming take from across the app was that cooking crabs alive is, to steal a phrase from the kids, diabolical. 

Do crabs feel pain?

Josh Cottle is an anatomy teacher and self-proclaimed science nerd. And with nearly a million followers and 27 million likes, he’s one of the most beloved science creators on TikTok. 

He said, “This is terribly inhumane. Crabs […] have a pretty advanced nervous system. They have nociceptors just like you and have demonstrated avoidance behavior from pain. 

“They can learn a stimulus and avoid it in the future. They will also demonstrate something called limb guarding. If something is injured, like if they break their claw, they will guard that and keep it away from further stimulation, indicating that they do feel pain.”

Research from the University of Gothenburg backs him up. Their study published in October 2024 is among the first to prove that painful stimuli are sent to the brain of shore crabs, providing evidence for pain in crustaceans.

Paul McCartney‘s famed quote became a popular animal rights slogan, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” 

But this video suggests that we are a long way off from that. Despite watching the crabs’ painful demise through a glass air fryer, few users declared they were going vegetarian. 

Instead, social media has turned the slaughterhouse into a spectacle, and this is an escalation of what people are willing to do for views and virality. 

One can argue that the countless stitches and comment backlash indicate that animal cruelty is deeply unpopular, but unpopularity doesn’t mean it can’t be monetised. Rage bait views are still views nonetheless and, frankly, negative reactions make videos trend just as highly as, if not more than, positive ones. 

Animal abuse is rising on social media

According to a 2024 report from the UK Safer Internet Centre, there has been a significant rise in animal abuse reports across social media channels. 

This correlates with 2023 findings from the RSPCA, which attributes a rise in animal abuse in England and Wales to social media, citing their Kindness Index, a national survey of attitudes towards animal welfare. Their research found that 43 per cent  of 16- to 17-year-olds had witnessed cruelty online that year, with Instagram, TikTok and X being the main platforms on which they saw it.

Another case in point: just this past week, an American woman in a suburb of Philadelphia was found guilty on four charges of aggravated cruelty to animals. 

According to police, Anigar Monsee tortured animals to gain popularity on social media. In one video, Monsee is seen with a chicken. 

Speaking to Action News, Upper Darby Police Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt said, “During the video, she is soliciting more likes and more viewers. And once she gets to the point where she is satisfied with the number of viewers, she then proceeds – over the course of 10 minutes – to harm and ultimately kill that chicken.” 

Such a conviction would be impossible to secure for crabs, however. 

In the United States, crabs, being invertebrates, are not explicitly covered under federal animal cruelty statutes like the Animal Welfare Act, which primarily applies to warm-blooded animals and certain invertebrates like some marine mammals and farm animals.

What animals are protected in Europe?

In the European Union, animal welfare laws tend to be more comprehensive and include protections for a wider range of animals, including certain invertebrates like crustaceans. 

The EU’s legislation on animal welfare, such as Regulation (EC) No 338/97 and subsequent amendments, has increasingly recognised invertebrates, especially crustaceans like crabs and lobsters, as capable of feeling pain and stress.

Specifically, the EU has taken steps to improve the humane treatment of crustaceans, including regulations around how they should be kept and slaughtered to minimise suffering. For instance, some countries have banned live boiling of lobsters and crabs without stunning, reflecting a recognition of their capacity to suffer.

Unfortunately, Chels – now dubbed by TikTok’s search as the ‘glass air fryer crab lady’ and who could not be reached for comment at the time of this writing – did not get that memo. 

She declares near the end of her video that she will be air frying her crabs from now on. No word yet on whether or not her future crab dinners will come with a show.