Why the Lobster?

I am willing to admit that David Foster Wallace's essay, "Consider the Lobster" did make a good point.  It is true that many animals suffer severe pains from being turned into food.  I do appreciate how Wallace tries to raise questions of this issue, but there are a few components of the essay that I would like to criticize about.  Also, I will act as a devil's advocate against Wallace's argument.

Wallace vividly describes the various ways a lobster can experience "painful stimuli" and even uses scientific evidence to back his claim (Wallace 673).  However, one may weakly argue that lobsters do not easily feel pain because that they do not have a "cerebral cortex" to feel any pain (qtd. in Wallace 673).  This is a weak claim because Wallace easily makes a rebuttal by saying "this... claim is either false or fuzzy" (Wallace 673).  Nevertheless, there is still a different argument to be made that does not reject the assumption that lobsters feel pain.  It states that feeling pain is a part of being alive and is unavoidable.  In other words, animals will feel pain while being eaten simply because of the food chain.  Predators will keep on gruesomely and inhumanely eating prey even if all humans stopped eating meat.  In fact, humans abusing a lamb for food is just as cruel as a lamb being eaten by wolves while the lamb is conscious.  Therefore, humans should not care if about the pain animals suffer because of the food chain (or food web).  Such consumption is simply a part of the cycle of life.  (I am playing as a devil's advocate as I write this paragraph.  So I personally do not completely agree with this justification of animal abuse.)

Now I am going to give a personal criticism of "Consider the Lobster."  I have always wondered why would Wallace choose a lobster out of all of the animals he could have chosen from (besides the fact that he visited the Maine Lobster Festival).  In my opinion, there are many other examples of animals cruelty that could've served as better examples.  In France, Geese get forcefully fattened even when they are not hungry so foie gras can be well made.  In China, rabbits are skinned alive and have their fur gets processed into coats.  (I do not know why they have to be alive.)  In Korea, farmed puppies are hanged on a tree branch and are beaten to death (before being incinerated) to produce "better" meat.  In America, chickens are drugged to have bigger breasts; but this increase in mass had gave the chickens more weight than their delicate, limp legs could carry.  There are many more scenarios I can list, but I can't list them all because there are far too many of them.  However, I do think that if Wallace used a bird or a mammal instead of a lobster, he would've made a bigger impact.  After all, less people feel empathy for a lobster's suffering than that for a cow.  In fact, many people in the real world would like to see lobsters get cooked as seen with the World's Largest Lobster Cooker being "an attraction" (Wallace 675).  To put it bluntly, a lobster's life is treated like that of an "insect" (Wallace 666).  Very few people will feel bad for a squashed fly or a poisoned ant; this attitude is roughly similar to that of cooking a lobster since most people don't think about an arthropod's pain.  If Wallace wrote about a mammal, his essay may be more effective on his audience than it already is because many more people can connect to a mammal's feelings.  They know that mammals clearly have a brain to sense pain. (Unlike lobsters, which don't have much of a brain.)  Therefore, Wallace's essay may have a bigger impact on people's minds if he wrote about a different animal.  (I am not saying "Consider the Lobster" was not effective at all, I am saying it could be more meaningful with some alterations.)