CAPE ELIZABETH, ME—In what is being described as the most ruthless act of bovine–crustacean violence in years, local authorities confirmed Monday that a charging herd of cattle had trampled 49 lobsters to death on the southern coast of Maine, marking a bloody escalation in their surf ’n’ turf war.
According to reports, the shoreline at Crescent Beach State Park was littered with crushed claws and carapaces, the deadliest hit yet in a week of intensifying conflict between lobsters and cows. The fragile 16-month truce between the rivals is said to have been shattered Sunday when a lone mother cow wandered into lobster territory at low tide and, after a tense exchange of shouted insults, lost her left front hoof in a pincer attack.
“I heard this awful pop, pop, pop sound of shells cracking under hooves and immediately called the cops,” said longtime Maine resident Anna Newman, who on Monday heard loud, taunting moos outside her beach house and witnessed the indiscriminate stampeding of lobsters as she crouched low and peered out from behind a curtain. “Bad blood between the cows and the shellfish goes back a long way, of course, but I’ve never seen it get this vicious before.”
“Yesterday, a steer drove his horn straight through a soft-shell crab that was just minding his own business, and the day before that, a whole pod of angry lobsters pinched a cow’s udder off right in front of her calves,” she continued. “It’s a nightmare.”
High-ranking bovine lieutenants are believed to have ordered Monday’s deadly trampling after the carcass of a young heifer from a prominent cow family washed up on the shore near Kettle Cove, her hide branded with a pair of crossed pincers and the phrase “sea life.” This insignia is known to be used by affiliates of the Atlantic Lobster and King Crab crews, who were themselves reportedly retaliating against the cows after an incident last week in which a ferocious bull gored to death an entire school of great northern prawns.
With the killing Thursday of a dozen Wellfleet oysters in a disputed tide pool, reports confirmed the current surf ’n’ turf war has become the deadliest since the 1980s, when hostilities between lobsters and cows were so common that no creature could cross through a pasture or estuary without fear of being brutally fileted or shelled.
Participants on both sides of the present conflict suggested the widespread killings would get worse before they got better.
“We merely seek to defend ourselves against those who would scuttle onto our territory and steal the land right out from under our hooves,” said cow boss Gertie, who decried the crustacean’s atrocities, citing the alleged abduction of a Holstein steer who had a strip steak snipped out of his still-living body by a King Crab enforcer. “The only way we can succeed is for the Herefords and Longhorns to extend their dominion over the ocean and root out our enemies where they live. Every lobster must die—whether they are killed in battle or after a period of confinement in a crowded supermarket aquarium.”
“The bays and inlets will run red with bisque,” she added.
Independent sources confirmed lobster have subjected cows to an excruciating practice known as “brining,” in which captive bovines are forced to drink seawater until they die of dehydration. At the same time, reports have suggested cows indoctrinate their young into a violent lifestyle before they are even weaned, forcing calves to prove their mettle by stealing lobster traps and placing them in the sun, where, after baking in agony for a day or more, their occupants eventually suffocate.
“For too long we have been relegated to second-class status alongside these disgusting slabs of fat and gristle—even our humble bivalve brethren know they are superior to cows,” said lobster patriarch Klktelek, who wears a string of cowbells around his neck, each one reportedly taken from a cow he has killed slowly, pinch by pinch. “Cows poison the planet with their shit and eat everything in their path. We will roast them on spits right there in their own meadows and fields, hanging their severed heads on every wall from ocean to prairie.”
Klktelek added, “Soon it will only be surf, no turf.”