Crabbing around the UK’s seaside resorts is one those traditions that Brits seem to be keen on maintaining, possibly in fear of losing our unique island culture. Ahem…But like fox hunting, does a shared pastime really need to indulge in harassing animals for fun?
For residents and tourists in the Norfolk town of Wells-next-the-Sea, it’s time to start thinking about the crabs’ health and safety and not just the darling children’s fingers and toes. A leaflet produced by University of Cambridge zoology students and paid for by the Norfolk Coast Partnership, tells children how to properly care for crabs after catching and keeping them captive in buckets. The Cambridge students have revealed that crabs get stressed and risk badly injuring each other when contained together in buckets. Here are three pointers in their leaflet being given out to 10,000 people this weekend:
• Keep only ten crabs or fewer in a bucket at a time;
• Hold the captives in seawater - and change the water every hour;
• Make sure your bucket isn’t in direct sunlight.
Nice to see how they include the word ‘captives’. Now just to translate that mindset into ‘oohhh, I see, so we shouldn’t be keeping crabs captive at all’. But hey, great start guys.
