Just days before thousands flock to Shediac for the annual Lobster Festival, their iconic giant lobster attraction has been vandalized.

Mayor Roger Caissie says someone decided it would be fun to apply spray paint, “Staff discovered the giant lobster was spray painted on Tuesday. Basically, it’s the first time that there has been any vandalism or spray painting of the giant lobster. The lobster has been there since 1990. It has become an icon of Shediac as a result of being the lobster capital of the world.”

He says they have experienced more and more vandalism as of late, but they’re usually dealing with tagging or other pictures in public spaces that they can just paint over, but with the lobster, there’s a much bigger process.

“The lobster gets an annual touch-up by an artist in order to maintain the colour scheme and maintain it so it’s in good shape in terms of being presentable. That was being done by a local artist for a number of years and she has passed the brush over to Jared Betts. He maintains the lobster in early June, depending on Mother Nature. Mr. Betts had just recently finished his touchups to the giant lobster, but now we’ve called on him for his services again, and he’s going to be doing that on Friday morning,” Mayor Caissie says.

The annual touch-ups to the lobster are a big job, because of the size of the attraction. It’s the largest lobster in the world and weighs a little over 90 tonnes.

Mayor Caissie is frustrated that they are dealing with this, but he is encouraged by the number of positive comments from the public on social media posts, expressing their support for the community, and their outrage over the vandalism.

There are no cameras at the lobster site currently, but Caissie says it is something they may look at in the future, “None of these answers are cheap, but we had been talking about that a little bit.  But putting a camera, sometimes you can’t tell the difference of what it is looking at.  We might need higher-end technology.”

He is asking anyone who thinks they may have information about this incident or any other act of vandalism in the Town to contact the RCMP.