I understand when people speak about the ethical problems with eating meat, but I think they do not apply to fish.
Why do you think they do not apply?
Some reasons why I think they apply:
- fish are animals
- industrial fishing is destroying the oceans and sea life (way more is killed than what ends up sold and eventually maybe eaten)
- international waters are a lawless playground for every abuse imaginable
I eat fish so I am not playing the guilt game, they’re just the ethical considerations I can think of.
Counterpoint: we really don’t know how much self-awareness fish have versus the mammals that the OP seems to be referring to. Call it gross anthropocentrism, but most people respect the lives of non-humans in terms of intelligence. Pigs are pretty well understood to he intelligent and are probably conscious of what’s going on around them. Some shrimp? Maybe not.
This doesn’t really address the meta concerns w/r/t procurement in your comment, but if I had to choose between a plate of fish or a plate of pork, this would be my thought process.
We do know octopi, for example, can solve complex puzzles
Just to be the super-nerd, octopus is not a regular latin word.
I think it is actually a greek loan word in latin.So the plural is either octopodes to follow the original greek or octopuses in regular english.
The correct plural is whatever word you say that people understand as meaning more than one octopus. That’s how language works.
If enough people make a language mistake, it becomes a rule.
I mean I get your point and for all intents and purposes I don’t even necessarily disagree.
I just wanted to add this little factoid, since I think using “octopi” instead of the at least equally as correct “octopuses” shows that one tries to follow the etymology of the word.
And if you try to do that, the etymologically correct plural is “octopodes”.Then again I hesitated even answering you, since I am by no means one of those weirdos that has a problem with language changing.
For all I care we can talk about octopussies and octopiarians or whatever, but as someone that had to learn latin as a child, the use of octopi just kind of itches my brain.
But it is all good, I get what you are saying and my first post was never meant as a negative critique of OP and more as a fun fact.
That’s true, and a lot of westerners take issue with octopus as food
‘Octopi’, interestingly enough, is a result of people assuming that the word ‘octopus’ comes from Latin because it ends in -us, which would mean that the correct plural drops the ‘us’ and replaces it with an ‘i’. But, trickily enough, it does not come from Latin; it comes from Greek. As a result, if you’re trying to be super technical, the correct plural would instead replace the ‘us’ with ‘odes’–octopodes.
Of course, almost nobody actually uses that term unless they’re doing it for fun. The most commonly used, correct plurals for octopus are ‘octopuses’ and ‘octopus’.
I hope you enjoy that little tidbit as much as I did when I learned it.
The Octopuses solving puzzles is actually overblown a bit. I used to work in an aquarium and had to teach an octopus to open a jar to get its food out. They can do this, but they’re not that smart so you need to break it into tiny steps. Even ‘your food is inside the jar’ was a difficult lesson.
@ozymandias117 octopuses can also teach puzzlesolving to others and also display altruism.
They will also punch fish they hunt with if they are frustrated with them, which is hilarious.
They also are very good with olives and potatoes
@Chuymatt totally hilarious!
When I first saw footage of them hunt that way I thought it was an equal partnership like fish have with eels, but the punching makes it clear that’s not how the octopus sees it.
@PP_BOY_ but more and more research is showing us that fish are smart.
E.g goldfish driving “cars” around in a room, the research on those fish that choose eels to hunt with and communicate via gesture, etc
It’s not that they don’t apply to us, it’s that they don’t apply to many vegetarian cultures. I remember a lesson in history class about how, when Buddhism arrived in Japan and preached against meat consumption, fish were so ingrained in Japanese diet they had a literal revolution to keep fish on the menu. Not just the stereotypical things like sushi, but I guess they like fish so much they’ll eat dolphins (which their cuisine has always considered “fish”), which to me is equal in gravity to cannibalism, this coming from someone who doesn’t necessarily like them. Because if an animal is mindful enough to engage in diplomacy, why the hell are we eating them?
Sometimes this “except you” attitude is also applied to insects, though that seems to be less culturally specific. If people need to for some reason reconcile vegetarianism with needing meat, I don’t understand why they don’t do the obvious thing and just separate meat of animals killed in cold blood from other meats.
I think this kind of example is interesting as it demonstrates how much of a person’s values and ethics are determined by cultural factors.
I’ve always been fascinated by cuisine as a part of culture and your demonstrated overlap of cuisine and ethics is another fascinating aspect to ponder.
Sushi as we know it is actually relatively modern. The Japanese made a few exceptions to vegetarianism mostly out of practicality. For example, birds were also not seen as animals.
Somewhat related to this, there was an emperor who died of beriberi because apparently all he ate was polished white rice.
I disagree. The two main arguments against eating land animals are 1) cruelty and deprivation of life and 2) effect on the planet.
Both of these apply. Commercial fishing uses inhumane killing methods and fish are actually quite intelligent.
Overfishing is completely destroying the ocean ecosystems and will even have a knock-on effect on land ecosystems eg salmon in rivers normally transfer masses of nutrients to land and trees via bears etc.
The idea that fish do not experience pain is also ludicrous… They possess a central nervous system and can very much feel pain.
I’m also opposed to catch & release fishing for fun/sport for this reason.
Imagine a hyper-advanced species suddenly and painfully yanked you up into different atmospheric conditions where you’re desperately unable to breathe.
Is it perfectly acceptable just because they put you back down in your natural environment before you died, with a new painful wound and traumatic experience?
I certainly don’t think so…
Their bodies are also formed to exist supported by the water. When taken out their very bodies are crushing their organs. It’s grim.
This depends on how deep the fish lives. For example, where I live, anglers are required to have a descending device on them and ready to go to quickly return a deeper sea fish to the depths without causing it significant harm.
At the same time, all hooks are required to be barbless so as to cause minimal damage to whatever is caught.
It definitely doesn’t. Animal from the deep sea are used to being under higher pressure, that’s an entirely different issue and not what I’m talking about.
Fish of any level will be supported in the water in a way that they won’t in air so they haven’t developed the structure of land animals to keep their organs from crushing each other.
Then there’s a whole host of other issues that occur - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Physiological-responses-occurring-when-fish-are-removed-from-water-Effects-of-air_fig1_281930182#:~:text=exposure%20can%20be%20considered%20acute,(Ferguson%20and%20Tufts%201992).
Even when only removed from the water for a short time a proportion of the fish die after being put back. When the time is increased to do measurements, take photos, whatever else you want to do, the proportion that die shortly after increases quite quickly.
OP didn’t specify commercial fishing. What about traditional fishing practices, or a singular fisher catching for himself/family?
Commercial fishing just makes it happen at scale a lot more efficiently. If every person who ate fish was out there fishing for themselves, I would imagine it would be a significantly larger impact than the commercial fishing.
You are deliberately not answering the question.
“If every person that ate fish was out there…” exactly - they purchase fish caught commercially because either they don’t know how to catch their own fish or they don’t have access to catch their own fish (access either with time, money, or physically). Commercial fishing solves that by precisely doing it “at scale a lot more efficiently” as you pointed out and ships the fish to where people will purchase it.
I didn’t ask “what if everyone went out and did it themselves”
I asked your thoughts on people who DO fish for themselves, or those using traditional fishing practices.
@Alue42 but that then still maps closely onto the ethical issues around meat-eating per se versus eating the products of commercial meat production.
Which makes eating fish no different to eating other kinds of meat in terms of the ethics.
In a global ecological sense, it is worse to eat fish than pork, we are sucking the seas dry, we have known it for decades, and invented new methods to do it more efficiently.
With land animals you can see the conditions and the effect of over production, with fish you don’t, and we keep at it.
Grown fish is less bad, but still contribute to pollution of the seas.
Trawling should be banned globally for a minimum of 50 years.
We have also invented ways to do it more sustainably, and even have handy wallet sized Sustainable Seafood Lists for each region of the US to make sure you make sustainable choices when eating at restaurants or purchasing at the market
Seafood Watch Guides@Alue42 we used to have these in New Zealand. It was a card you could keep in your wallet, listed all the common eating fish from best to worst, with sustainable ones coded green at the top and endangered ones in red.
But it was depressing over the years with each new edition to slowly see all those green fish turning orange and then red as each species became depleted.
I just tried looking for you, and the most up to date I could find was for 2017. That’s disappointing, but slightly out of date is better than nothing.
By 2017 it had already happened - almost all the NZ fish had gone from the green zone and they’d started putting farmed shellfish and stuff caught in international waters at the top of the list to make up for it.
I think those of us who care about our local marine environment seldom eat actual fish now. We don’t really need a guide any more.
They are certainly a lot of issues with eating fish. Maybe not the same as factory farmed land animals. More along the lines of extinction of species and the destruction of ecosystems. It’s worth looking into if it’s something you are concerned with. There’s also indirect cruelty to more intelligent species like dolphins.
Was that particular fish a dick?
Spiny dogfish. Those spiny, bait-stealing little jerks.
Yeah, like (not exactly fish) fish-like sea mammal named Dolphin. He or She is Asshole
No but he was gay
Depends on the perspective being considered:
Are fish sentient? Yes.
Are they very sentient, with lots of free-will? No.
Does our current industry’s completely-gutting the marine food-chain have global consequences? Yes.
How are we doing with respect to keeping that food-chain alive? Terrible: any species that becomes our industrial prey, gets reduced to 10% of its normal population within 1 decade.
Cod used to live to be about 80y old, ttbomk, now they live to be 8, or less.
The smashing of the coral-forests they breed in, at the bottom of the ocean, with dragger-nets ( falsely called “rock hoppers” ), means the cod-fishery collapsed & stayed collapsed, and all fisheries are “managed” like that, by lobbying to protect industrial-ignorance.
Accountability won’t ever happen, because industry/money won’t tolerate that.
There’s a ScientificallyTestablePrediction in the Christian bible, in Rev, that both terrestrial & marine food-chains collapse ( at the time of the “3rd Seal” ).
That is going to happen this century, no matter what political/religious rabies goes rampaging where.
All the political & religious & food-insecurity & ClimatePunctuation wars that we must enact in order to “manage” our unconscious-minds’ stress/fear/panic, and all of the nihilist malicious-actors ( China cyaniding other country’s seas, because those other countries are not breaking & obeying China, in recent news )…
Morality is contextual.
Personal-context can say 1 thing, or another, global context can be quite different.
Buddha said that eating the flesh of another’s life was faulty because they never consented to be butchered/consumed, and that is true.
I can’t remember what other reasons were given, that one stuck on me.
I don’t eat any meat, or that aweful “Beyond Meat” or “Impossible Meat” stuff, because I can’t then reach the meditations I’m using to rip my continuum out from this world’s ideology-driven death-spasms, and remaining in this world, now, is indulging in being ground-to-hamburger, in my eyes.
I want out.
Eating meat of any kind blocks me from progressing on that through the meditations, exactly as the ancient rishis of India said.
That tested to be true.
You have to live with yourself, not with my conscience.
You decide on your own morality: you have to live with it.
I’ve never bothered learning the “precepts” or any of the other stuff of AwakeSoulism/Buddhism: I care about results, not about dogma.
What tests to be true, that is worth relying-on, for me.
_ /\ _
Thems a lotta words, bro.
Fishing is industrialized too, so that can be a problem, specifically with the aquatic ecosystem. For vegans, fish still have a central nervous system so they are deemed undesireable. I still would eat fish because of health reasons, though.
I’m reminded of the thought experiment of the vegan oyster.
The oyster lacks a CNS and cannot feel pain or suffering. It’s farming is a net benefit on the environment its in as it acts as a natural filter for purifying waterways. It is nutritious. Is it vegan? If not, why? Is it that is merely alive? How does that differ from a plant or mushroom?
While I don’t think one could seriously suggest an oyster is vegan friendly food, it’s an interesting line of thinking to inspect one’s own values.
All I can say is I truly embrace the fact that I’m a human and an omnivore. I don’t deny there are ethical horrors with the way animals are raised for slaughter, it’s quite disgusting in fact. But I ALSO can’t deny that I love eating meat off the bone - chicken wings, spare ribs, steak, you name it. When I’m eating meat I’m very happy indeed. And I don’t try to pretend I can justify it as somehow OK with regard to how the animals are slaughtered.
I’m a walking contradiction in many regards. I don’t try to reconcile my love of meat with my love of animals. I have both, and they sometimes are in conflict. I eat all kinds of things, veggies and grains and all kinds of stuff, but my primary love is meat. I don’t deny it, and I don’t justify it. It is what it is, and so am I.
On a simple level I’d say it depends on the brain structure so it’d vary by fish species even. Though as others have said, things like living conditions and overfishing are ethical issues nonetheless.
Though I just wanted to post this silly video, Would You Eat a Fish if it had Arms and Legs? by Mattias Pilhede. Mirror link
“It’s okay to eat fish 'cause they don’t have any feelings.” - Nirvana
My entire ethical framework for what animals are ok to eat is wether or not it’s cute.
I say eat them.
Could you envision a fish so cute you would feel it is unethical to consume it?
I started imagining what it would look like and it was just a baby seal
What attributes of the seal differentiate it from a fish that makes it to cute to snack upon?
It looks like a sea puppy
Axolotl
Octopodes
Not fish, but absolutely adorable and intelligent and unethical to eat.
Fish would eat you if they got the chance.
Depends on the ethical framework you use to decide eating animals is unacceptable. A person picking diet based on religious teachings might land on a different position than a person who picking their diet based on opposition to factory farming.
I can’t think of any ethics or morals that are universal. Even the simplistic “golden rule”, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is open to some interpretation.
What about eating meat is ethical or unethical and how does that apply or not apply to eating fish?
extreme environmental issues, mass execution of innocence, destruction of indigenous culture and land.
theres definitely a couple easy ones to point to.
idk why it wouldnt apply to fish
Farmed fish is probably not too bad by comparison but… wild caught fish hell no. We’re speed running fucking up the ocean ecosystem and ruining the aquatic biosphere. It always alarms me when I see a change to the species of fish used in “generic budget oven-cook battered fish fillets”. It doesn’t even seem possible to make wild catch fishing sustainable, unlike every other form of animal husbandry where you could argue it’s more of a technical challenge.
Hmm now I realise I’m a hypocrite. Think I’ll stop eating fish
Farmed fish is often worse. The fish are kept in small pens and given tons of antibiotics, polluting the local water. Sometimes those non-native fish escape the pens and interbreed with native species. They are also less nutritious than wild fish, at least when it comes to salmon.
Well, fuck.
