Actress Mary Tyler Moore died Wednesday at the age of 80 . While she was best known for her acting, she was also an outspoken animal rights advocate.

Author David Foster Wallace may have been the most famous critic against the practice of boiling lobsters for culinary consumption writing the essay Consider the Lobster in 2004 but Moore was also a celebrity advocate for the crustaceans.

In 1995, Moore wrote a an open letter criticizing an annual Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland. Marine biologists report that lobsters are fascinating beings with complex social interactions, long childhoods and awkward adolescences, she wrote, continuing, Like humans, they flirt with one another and have even been seen walking claw-in-claw! And like humans, lobsters feel pain.

Just a year before, Moore had improbably gone to war to save one particular lobster named Spike.

At the time, the lobster had recently survived a lobster festival in a Malibu, California, restaurants tank, presumably because customers found Spikes large size and therefore potential older-age of around 50 years (lobsters grow with age) to be fascinating.

Moore wanted to rescue the lobster from the restaurants tank and facilitate a return to the ocean. She offered to spend $1,000 just to buy the lobster.

Although I do not pretend to know precisely how Spike feels living in a small tank away from his natural habitat, Moore wrote in a letter to the restaurant, I am certain that by whatever means a lobster can feel and understand its surroundings, this one would prefer to be back home in his native waters off the coast of Maine.

The restaurant declined. Then, to make a political statement, conservative blowhard Rush Limbaugh offered to buy the lobster for $2,000.

Spikes welcome for dinner, Limbaugh apparently said at the time in a press release, but he shouldnt plan on dessert.