PETA’s topless lobster protest at Maine Lobster Festival goes viral.
PETA staged its latest protest outside the Maine Lobster Festival this week by having a woman lie topless on a giant plate, painted red to resemble a lobster, positioned next to a lemon wedge and a bowl of melted butter.
The message on the display read: “Try to Relate to Who’s on Your Plate.”
The photos went viral almost immediately after PETA posted them on X. The online conversation that followed focused considerably less on lobster welfare than the organisation had probably hoped. Several commenters noted they were now thinking about lobster more than ever.
A protest with a serious point behind it
The stunt may have raised eyebrows but the science behind PETA’s argument has moved significantly in recent years and a growing number of governments around the world are taking it seriously.
A review of over 300 peer-reviewed scientific studies concluded there is strong and diverse evidence that lobsters and other decapod crustaceans are sentient and capable of feeling pain.
The UK recognised this in law in 2022, and in December 2025 its government stated that live boiling is not an acceptable killing method. Switzerland requires lobsters to be stunned before they are killed. New Zealand and Norway have also introduced legal protections for crustaceans.
The United States has no equivalent federal protections.
“It’s extremely cruel and unnecessary, and everyone can go vegan and stop eating lobsters today,” PETA campaigner Mason Melito said at the scene.
PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk called on the festival’s board to rename the event “The Red Death Festival” and replace its lobster-eating contest with “The Heat Challenge,” where participants would endure increasingly high temperatures to simulate what lobsters experience when boiled alive.
“No meal is worth such cruelty,” she said.
A decade of showing up
PETA has been protesting the Maine Lobster Festival for over a decade. A near-identical topless protest in 2016 drew the same reaction with photos spreading everywhere, people laughed, and then went inside to eat lobster.
Last year the organisation tried a different approach entirely, suing the festival and the City of Rockland to have the live steaming of lobsters declared a public nuisance. A state judge dismissed the case in January 2026, ruling the activity did not legally qualify as a nuisance.
Having lost in court, PETA went back to the plate.
Comments ranged from supportive to bemused to openly hungry.
“PETA, I’m pretty sure whatever goal they were trying to achieve against people eating lobsters missed the mark,” one commenter wrote.
Another offered a more generous assessment: “The goal is engagement. They knocked that out of the park.”
PETA presumably does not expect a topless woman painted red to stop anyone from ordering lobster. It expects the photos to be shared a million times, and for the question of lobster welfare to sit in the back of someone’s mind the next time they look at a menu.
The Maine Lobster Festival runs through Sunday and around 16,000 lobsters will be steamed.
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