Diner orders $215 live lobster and releases it back into the sea, saving it from the 'torture' of chef's pot

• A woman ordered a $215 lobster dish and then released the live lobster back into the sea.
• The diner was "very happy and thrilled to have been able to fulfill this wish," says the owner.

A tourist ordered an expensive lobster dish, only to save the pricey delicacy from the cooking pot by releasing it back into the sea.

The Swiss woman paid $215 for a Catalan-style lobster with linguine pasta at a high-end seafood restaurant in Golfo Aranci, on the island of Sardinia, in Italy, The Mail Online reported.

The report said she was dining at the port-side Gente di Mare restaurant with her husband on Sardinia's ritzy Costa Smeralda or Emerald Coast, a playground for the super-rich and A-list celebrities.

Antonio Fasolino, co-owner of the restaurant, told The Mail Online the woman, who remains anonymous, ordered the lobster, and he took it to the kitchen and weighed it at over four pounds. He told the couple it would cost them €200, the equivalent of $215.

The woman viewed the live lobster placed in a transparent bucket and brought to her and her husband's table.

Instead of ordering the crustacean to be cooked with linguine, she asked if it would "get hurt" if she released it from a certain height, per The Mail Online.

The restaurant owner said he initially thought the woman was joking. "Then, I understood that the lady was serious and wanted to do a good deed. Seeing her joy and excitement, I was moved, too," Fasolino said.

Many consider the way lobsters are prepared for human consumption to be cruel. Lobsters are cooked alive in scalding hot water, as their flesh contains bacteria that multiply and could become toxic when dead.

It has been suggested the lobster does not feel pain because it does not have a brain, but researcher Gordon Gunter described this method of killing lobsters as "unnecessary torture" in the journal Science, per PETA.

People at the restaurant reassured the woman that dropping it from the low dock height wouldn't hurt it. A video shows her gently putting the lobster through a metal railing and letting it drop into the sea, as another person filmed. When it hit the water, it swam away to safety, said the Mail Online.

"She was very happy and thrilled to have been able to fulfill this wish, and we were happy with her," said Fasolino.

According to PETA, tens of millions of lobsters are caught in traps and consumed annually in the United States alone. A lobster can live to be more than 100 years-old if it can avoid predators of which man is the most dangerous.