"It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings." - Nirvana
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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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.
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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.
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If fish could eat you do you believe they would think it's unethical?
If you answer it's yes then don't eat fish.
If a fish ate me, I wouldn't find it unethical at all.
I feel the same about cows, chickens and pigs.
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 will go to swim with sharks to see if they talk about if eating me it's ethical or not.
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.
Fish can and do eat you
There's a fish nibbling on me right now and i didn't even notice!
Fish would eat you if they got the chance.
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.
Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life.
This is necessary.
Calm down Aquaman.
i mean, animal farming isn't technically necessary at this point in human and technological evolution
They didn't say farming is necessary. They said that it was necessary that life feeds on life.
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.