Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. – G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain (The New World )
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.
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.
I see two concerns, humanitarian and ecological. The ecological concern is only a problem with overconsumption. The humanitarian concern I don’t think applies to fish since they are dumb.
What about bycatch? That’s a factor in both. Also ecological: the fact that most of the plastic waste in the sea (and on earth in general) is from fishing. Also, not all seafood is dumb. Octopus is one of the smartest things out there and we eat that. Lobsters have been shown to feel pain and we boil them alive.
So you’re only addressing the dumb point… despite some of these not being considered intelligent, they still have central nervous systems and therefore feel pain. That’s a very basic ethical concern. Why is intelligence the only concern? Should we eat all the dumber humans?
Bycatch is also an issue in this point because innocent and more intelligent creatures like dolphin and octopus will be caught, killed and not even eaten.
I mean undesirable and unethical are not the same thing. I wouldn't really even place an ethical question on a fish, unless maybe they live in an aquarium and know better or something (like eating their handler, assuming living conditions are good). Not even moral questions really, though a hungry fish is probably acting pretty morally to meet its base needs TBH.
That said, if there was a neck-snapper-fish I'm pretty sure people would seek it out. And they'd say stuff like live by the fish, die by the fish.
I mean if I was in the ocean and a shark just wanted to grab a bite to eat that's just fine. I can't really swim anyways so I guess that'd be preferable. Just as long as they're quick about it.
Also I hear sharks are really smooth, so that's nice.
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.
Could depend on the fish species in question? Lionfish for example is extremely invasive in the Southern USA, so environmental agencies have been encouraging people to eat them to curb their population, potentially making it a more ethical choice. I’ve been seeing it pop up more and more, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on too much.
But we should definetly limit our consumption though when it comes to more threatened/overfished species. There’s also some unethical fishing practices out there such as removing sharks’ fins then stranding them, causing harm to cetaceans, and other environmentally destructive fishing techniques.
The only reason it hasn't caught on is because they are very difficult to catch (spear) and even more difficult to prepare (venom glands). They are unbelievably delicious, but even so, I'm not going to trust a chef a don't know to be sure he didn't pierce one of those glands while preparing it. I'll trust myself or one of my friends that I no for 100% certain can do it right. So even though a handful of restaurants were offering it in the Keys and Miami, you'll really see people catching it themselves and preparing it just to be sure.
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.
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.
I said no such thing. I said the supposed ethical problems with eating animals referenced by OP are not ones I think apply to most animals, and so it is ethical to eat them.
What “supposed” ethical problems are you referring to that you’re hand waving away then? That farm animals are cute? How about overfishing, destruction of marine environments, bycatch, pollution caused by and left in the sea by fishing, evidence that fish feel pain and that some are proven to have more complex intelligence than other animals.
That’s not really how ethical problems work. They are supposed to define why we should or shouldn’t do something. Even saying “nah dawg, fish tasty” would be more reasoning than you’ve provided.
You’ve not provided any reasons sufficient for me to consider eating fish or meat unethical. The issues you mentioned are ones I consider morally irrelevant to the ethical nature of eating these animals, and so I reject the claim that it is unethical.
So, you consider it ethical to bycatch, fish species to extinction, destroy marine environments and pollute the ocean freely despite there being ample alternatives to receive the nutrients you can get from fish? Please explain how these are irrelevant. Unless you personally catch each of your fish?
You’re the one claiming they are, and you’ve failed to provide any support. The burden of proof is on you to show that it is unethical. A claim which is asserted without support can be dismissed just as easily.
Sure, yeah, claim like “yeah it’s ethical to eat fish” with no reasoning behind it despite much prompting. You’re basically claiming the that either the points I’ve mentioned are not things that happen, or that they are totally ethical to do. So I’m not going to waste my time.
I am merely rejecting your claims that it is unethical, as you haven’t provided any grounds to support it.
I never claimed either that the points you mentioned do not happen or that they are ethical to do. I said they are irrelevant to the question of whether it is ethical to eat fish and meat.
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