Watch out! This is a true tale of MASS MURDER. I was sitting innocently at a banquet table at a seafood hotpot restaurant when the waiter walked into the room and plonked down a large platter.

Your columnist was to toast the host, who was celebrating his release from jail, when I saw out of the corner of my eye that all the items on the dish were writhing. Eww. We’d been served a large plate of live prawns on skewers. Each one was waving its tiny arms at me as if to say, "Don’t eat me." And since each had vast numbers of limbs, there was an awful lot of pathetic waving.

My appetite vanished. Is it too much for a guy to ask that his food be largely deceased at the time of consumption?

Pretending to have an urgent call to make, I stepped away from the table to phone my friend Sara, an animal lover, and ask her advice. "Rescue them," she hissed. "Grab them and run towards the nearest body of water."

I explained that they would have difficulty swimming away. "What about the skewers?" I asked. She said: "Remove the skewers unless they are running through important major organs." I told her that the skewers ran all the way from their tails to their heads: "Do heads count as important major organs?"

She thought for a moment before replying: "Yes, in all species except supermodels and Fox TV viewers." Sara said the skewers were a problem. The prawns would need to be anaesthetized before having them extracted at the same time as their tiny severed nerves were sewn together by micro-surgeons. After that, they would need lengthy programs of rehabilitation and occupational therapy.

Does the Society for the Protection of Animals provide such a service? Shockingly, no! Would my family health insurance cover this? Probably not. Would ambulances respond to a call to aid a distressed seafood appetizer? This also could not be guaranteed.

I got off the phone and returned to the table. After sitting in horrified indecision for another minute, I realized that there was only one thing to do. I grabbed the whole lot and dumped them into a large dish of hot soup. Death followed swiftly.

The following morning I confessed my actions to Sara. "You murderer," she said, and forwarded me a recent news report about a Danish TV reporter who was successfully prosecuted for killing 11 fish. Thank God I live in Asia. Seafood diners have never been successfully prosecuted on this side of the world.

In contrast, Westerners take their affection for sea food to extremes. In the US, there is a campaign to stop a Seattle tradition in which fishmongers throw dead fish and lobsters to each other across a fish market. US animal rights campaigners are up in arms, complaining that being hurled across the room is not good for the dignity of the deceased seafood items.

Normally I side with animal lovers, but not this time. Once items of food are on my plate, the bulk of their dignity has already departed. Now, if the Americans could be persuaded to send a few micro-surgeons over to Asia, those we could make use of.