Fish Civil Rights

[paul b]

As I was sitting here enjoying a tuna fish sandwich with a side of shrimp cocktail I was thinking about a thread I saw yesterday about how to euthanize a fish. Now I have been keeping fish since trillobites were the best clean up crew so I certainly don't want to see fish suffer, but I wonder how this tuna was euthanized or these shrimp.
Did they carefully put it in a small container, play soft music and dose it with clove oil? I really don't know. Those shrimp too. How did they meet their end?
Being of Italian decent, on Christmas it is our custom to have at least 7 different kinds of sea food for dinner. Last Christmas we had over twenty. Does that make us bad? Of course we never eat fish in view of my tank as that would be like canibalism and my fish may get the horrors.
My family owned a seafood market and on Fridays my Dad would bring me down to the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan to buy the seafood for his store. It is amazing that those tons of fish that were uncerimonesly dumped on the sidewalk, then moved around with snow shovels. Were they all euthanized. I wonder where they got the time.
And how much clove oil were they using?
In those days there were also huge sea turtles still alive on their backs. Now I know they were just pets as no one I know would hurt a beautiful sea turtle.
Every day I feed my fish live blackworms, clams and mysis. I am not sure if each one of those worms has feelings or thinks about it's family just before it gets eaten.
The millions of mysis also. Do they have more civil rights than the new born brine shrimp I feed my mandarins. Is there a brine shrimp rights group? How about the goldfish we sometimes feed to our moray eels. Do they have less rights than say a lionfish or tang? What if we fed tiny tangs to large goldfish, would that be OK? 
If we were to cycle a tank with a live fish or shrimp we would get yelled at from everyone, but it seems to be perfectly fine to cycle a tank with a fish or shrimp that suffocated on the deck of a ship. I wonder about that. I also wonder about the leather belt I am wearing. How did they remove that strip of skin from that cow without him noticing.
Many people dip corals in insecticide before they put them in their tanks to kill "pests". I am sure those "pests" think of us as pests and worse, murderers. If those "pests" were larger and cuter we would keep them as pets and try to kill the corals they were living on.
Just one of the things I think about.

Edited November 21, 2016 by paul b

[Bruleyii]

Paul, did you accidentally double your dose for your shoulder? lol

[paul b]

[FirstContact]

This is horrible news! So many fish meeting improper fates that I've decided to stick with dead cow!

[treesprite]

The disparity between "pet" animals and "prey" animals (for either pet or people food) is just one big hipocracy. Most of us would ultimately eat our pets if all other options were exhausted.

[paul b]

Last night I was a little hungry and was to lazy to go to the refrigerator, so I ate one of the arms off of my leather couch.  Is that bad!

[treesprite]

Does leather have any value at all as food? It would be cool if my ice rink zombie apocalypse scenario could include a use for the rental skate boots after all the blades have been removed to use for stabbing zombies in the head through the bars of the rental desk security gate (I keep calling it the zombie gate when I pull it down at night)(hmmm, "zombie gate" sounds like some political scandal involving the civil rights of the cured undead.... anyone else see BBC's "In the Flesh"?)

[paul b]

Leather is organic so I guess it has some food value.  Of course you would probably die and I am not sure if that matters.  

[treesprite]

Well, I just found out that most leather nowadays is tanned with chromic acid instead of tannic acid. Chromic acid is potentially lethal. So I guess I'm not eating the rental skate boots.

[KingOfAll_Tyrants]

I heard stories about people eating leather in extreme situations (e.g. German soldiers besieged at Stalingrad).  But that was in the days before chromic acid.

 

Fish do not have civil rights, as they are not participating members in civic society.  But, if you believe in animal rights, they certainly would have those.  

 

Seriously, these days I believe most commercially purchased fish are frozen basically once they're caught out of the ocean, and sit on the boat for as long as several months before they get to port and begin their trek to our freezers.  (fish markets often just defrost frozen fish, I'm told - yes? - unless they have access to a daily catch).  In the end, it's about as humane as using the freezer (anyone want to defrost and eat my extra clownfish?   :) jk)

 

Also, I have no sympathy for any non-exclusively-herbivorous marine creature -  they all have eaten animals (or protozoans) alive - multiple times in their lives, which die being suffocated and assaulted with harsh stomach acids.   

 

That being said, I would generally prefer my crustaceans, bivalves, etc. be frozen prior to cooking/consumption.  

Edited December 2, 2016 by KingOfAll_Tyrants

[treesprite]

Sounds like you may have seen that petition to get the Texas bar owner to stop serving shots containing live fish.

[paul b]

One of my favorite foods is live clams and oysters, but before I eat them, I put my ear right up to them to see if they are complaining.  So far, I have not heard anything.

 

[FirstContact]

Yeah, raw oysters are good. As much as I try, I just can't get by without food right? Maybe we should protest the savage unearthing of carrots.

[treesprite]

Yeah, raw oysters are good. As much as I try, I just can't get by without food right? Maybe we should protest the savage unearthing of carrots.

Vegetablearians do not eat anything they have to kill, so they do not eat root vegetables. No carrots, potatoes, onions, radishes, yams, etcetera. I don't know what I would do without potatoes and carrots.

[paul b]

Leave the carrots where they are. I would rather eat oysters. Vegetarians can eat rocks

Edited December 3, 2016 by paul b

[treesprite]

LOL. I don't eat animals and haven't for about 24 years, but I don't see how other people should see that as making me any different from people who don't eat other specific things. Some people won't eat anywhere that has mostly spicy food, which far worse than someone not eating animals.

 

Even as a kid I refused to eat seafood, because watching my grandma process fresh catch fish from the bay on the wood table at the dock in their back yard was the nastiest thing ever, and hearing the screeching of boiling crabs alive freaked me out big time. The bungalow always smelled like seafood. The other side of the family had the Susquehanna River as a back yard, literally only about 50 yards from the cabin, so we only dealt with freshwater fish there, which was nowhere near as offensive to me as the bay stuff. Maybe freshwater animals didn't have as many rights as saltwater animals. I did go fishing plenty of times, but would never eat the fish. I went crabbing as a kid too, until I realized what was causing the screeching. I have a very vivid memory of looking into this huge metal pot of boiling water and seeing the crabs crawling around, scratching and clacking on the metal and making that brain piercing blood curdling screeching noise. I wish people would at least kill the animals before they cook them, without torturing them first.

[paul b]

My  family had a sea food business so I grew up looking at that stuff screaching in the pot.  My life was surrounded by seafood as it was all we ate.

[treesprite]

I assume that the level of rights per species should be directly related to the respective value of each species. Every special interest group would have a different idea of what should be at the bottom and top of the scale. Then there will always be some extremist cult that will want to blow up half the planet to protest when the future government is forced to make legislation that will sacrifice the lowest species on the list in favor of preserving the next to lowest list (which I can totally imagine happening in the future when the declining environmental and ecological health of the planet has become so bad that such decisions will have to made, at which point the characteristics that determine what "fittest" (as in survival of the) is, will include degree of favor of the future dystopian government during any particular administration or rule.