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Is it ethical to eat fish?
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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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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.