Crabs

Crabs enter the story through Jack Harkness’s recollection of a morning at Poldhu Cove, where Jory Fry was tormenting one in a rock pool. The creature’s mistreatment becomes the stated catalyst for Harkness’s killing of Jory and exposes the moral distinction Harkness draws between earning a living from crabs and deliberately causing one needless suffering.

The Crab at Poldhu Cove

In Harkness’s account, he came upon Jory among the rock pools at Poldhu Cove as Jory was pulling the claws off a crab he had taken from the water. The crab is presented through this act of cruelty, rather than as an individualized character with a voice or independent role in the scene. Its importance comes from the response its treatment provokes in Harkness.

A Claimed Moral Boundary

Harkness says that Jory’s treatment of animals was something he particularly detested, and that seeing the crab harmed made something in him snap. He describes his action against Jory as conscious and deliberate, and says he never regretted it. The crab’s suffering thus becomes the immediate cause Harkness gives for his act, though the account does not make the animal an agent in the subsequent violence.

Livelihood and Cruelty

Harkness acknowledges the apparent contradiction in condemning Jory over a crab when his own father made a living catching crabs. His defense rests on a distinction between catching them for a livelihood and inflicting suffering for its own sake: he presents Jory’s conduct as crossing a moral line. That boundary belongs to Harkness’s stated judgment, not to an independently developed account of the crab; the animal functions in the scene both as the object of Jory’s cruelty and as the focus through which Harkness explains his own code.