What's So Fishy About Eating Anything With A Face?

Typical of the "intellectual" that I am, I was listening to Fox News the other day ...

Did that make you sit up and re-read that sentence?

I was making sure that you were carefully reading, and not merely skimming through my blog posts ;)  Let me start again.

Typical of the "intellectual" that I am, I was listening to Fox News NPR the other day, and it was a re-broadcast of an Intelligence Squared US debate.  The motion was was "Don't Eat Anything With A Face."  Yes, it was on eating animals.  The kind of issues that always attract this blogger like how a fish is drawn to its bait.  Wait, I am getting ahead of myself with the fish hook to this post!

As the chair of that session noted:

I think the whole process of raising and slaughtering animals is one that I think most of us prefer not to think about very much, and we're going to be forced to think about it tonight.

Sounded good to me.

The debated points weren't anything new.  But, I listened to it because I want to keep going up that hill where I think lies the answer to what the heck is life all about?

When we think of raising and killing animals for food, we typically do not think about fish.  And that is literally the point of departure for another piece, this one a text-based interview with Culum Brown, who is a biologist in Australia:

Most people think of fish as somehow lesser than pigs, cows, chickens and other land animals.

So, what is Brown's, ahem, beef with fish?  Plenty.  The entire interview will be well worth your time.  Even if you are not one who eats fish.  (Full disclosure: I have never had fish, and don't plan on eating them.)  Brown discusses how fish are not stupid and that they have fantastic learning skills, and they even pass along to the next generation the lessons they have learnt.  In the context of this post, on eating anything with a face, Brown says:

 If you do scientific research on fish, you have to go through the same procedures as if you were working on dogs, or cats, or monkeys. You have to go to the ethics committee, and explain the harms, and the benefits, and all that. So for most scientists, there's no implication.
But for the rest of the world, there are huge implications. For example, Britain is thought of the most progressive country in the world, in terms of animal rights. It just started to bring in legislation for aquaculture, which basically says that producers must report the number of animal deaths — which is absolutely fundamental — and they must report when they ship fish around. But this began back in the '50s and '60s for terrestrial commercial farms, when we started to think about things like moving pigs on the backs of trucks, and whether chickens had access to the real world. That revolution stopped at the water. Every major commercial agricultural system has some ethical laws, except for fish. Nobody's ever asked the questions: "What does a fish want? What does a fish need?"

The other day, I saw three guys cleaning up their fish haul by the marina.  I suspect we--society--are at ease with that being done in the open because fish don't scream.  It is not like slaughtering goats.  If you have heard a pig squeal, there is a good chance that you will never ever go anywhere near pork.  The horror of the screaming lambs haunted Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, remember?  But fish?  They make no noise.  The killing is silent and, hence, is done out in the open?

Perhaps because fish don't scream, we can easily convince ourselves that they don't feel any pain.  Not so, according to Brown:

Part of the problem comes back to the question of whether fish feel pain. But for the last 30 years, the neurophysiologists have known that they do, and haven't even argued about it. And from an evolutionary perspective, our pain perception systems —and the systems of all terrestrial vertebrates — come from a fish-like ancestor. Whether they're in the water, or on the land, they all have the same pain receptors. But for some reason, a lot of people refuse to believe that fish can feel pain

Brown then follows it up with this, which is the part I liked the best:

Currently, you go out, you catch a bunch of fish, you crush most of them to death in a net, you trawl them up from the bottom of the sea — which causes barotrauma for most of them — you dump them on a deck, half suffocate to death, the ones you don't want get thrown overboard and die anyway, and the ones you keep go on ice, just to preserve the flesh for market reasons. How do you do that in a way that has the fish's interests involved to any degree? You can't.

Back in graduate school, when potlucks were how we students typically got together, I was unprepared for a sight when I went to get daal that one had brought to the gathering: a fish's head, with the eyes in place, stared at me from the daal.  I walked away without serving myself.  Apparently a Bengali favorite.  Not mine!

Oh well.  Some day, before I die, I hope the answer to what is life will come to me.  I will be damned if that answer is that life is all about eating anything with a face!