Sean Cooper owns Catch at the Old Fish Market in Weymouth. He kept two crayfish in a tank at the restaurant after they were given to him by a fisherman, and he named them Ronnie and Reggie.
They were not being kept for food, but as pets and as something visitors could stop and look at while inside the restaurant. Cooper said they had become an unusual and educational point of interest for families, but both animals have now died.
A member of staff tried to stop her, but she took one of the crayfish from the tank and ran from the restaurant. According to The Independent, she then threw the animal into the harbor ‘like a cricket ball’.
Whatever she believed she was doing for the creature, Cooper said the result was likely the opposite. He explained that the animal, which was actually a crayfish and not a lobster, was taken from warm tank water and thrown into cold sea water, which he said almost certainly killed it right away.
Speaking on BBC Radio Solent’s Dorset Breakfast, Cooper said the crayfish had been his pets for a ‘couple of years’. He also said the difference in water temperature meant the animal likely ‘died the second it hit the harbour water’.
He said: “Crayfish are unusual in these waters. The local fishermen had caught them, we had taken them into the tank and when parents come into the fish shop with their children, they get to see unusual fish and shellfish.”
Cooper said he wanted ‘the book thrown’ at Smart, who was charged with causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal, theft, and assault. His reaction made clear that he saw the incident as far more than a disturbance inside a restaurant.
For him, it was the pointless death of an animal he had cared for, along with the loss of something he believed had value for local families. He said the crayfish were part of the restaurant’s atmosphere and gave children a chance to see unusual shellfish up close in a way they normally would not.
Smart had previously been arrested in 2022 after trying to enter the same restaurant while Sir David Attenborough was eating there in order to hand him a letter. That earlier incident meant this was not the first time she had come into conflict with the business.
At the time, she described the restaurant as ‘a symbol of excess and inequality in today’s world’, saying in a statement that Weymouth had some of the lowest average wages in the UK ‘yet this restaurant still continues business as usual amongst the worst cost of living crisis many will ever experience’.
