For Those Vegetarians Who Sometimes Eat Seafood
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

NotMilk.com
January 2014

[Ed Note: Please visit FishFeel.org and Fish Feel on Facebook.]

Eating fish is not healthy for the human body, but delivering pain to fish is not healthy for the human spirit, when pain and suffering is justified by so many.

"If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise."
 - William Butler Yeats

Yesterday (January 15, 2014), fishing made news on two fronts. First, The United States House of Representatives passed a Bill containing $75 million in disaster aid to commercial fishermen. Second, it was revealed that commercial fishermen have taken fish (black sea bream) containing deadly levels of radioactive cesium tested at 12,400 becquerels per kilogram which is 124 times the safe human threshold for human consumption. The fish contamination resulted from the 2011 Japanese Fukushima power plant nuclear disaster. [Ed. Note: See Fish testing at 124 times over radiation limit caught off Fukushima, January 2014.]

Eating fish is not healthy for the human body, but delivering pain to fish is not healthy for the human spirit, when pain and suffering is justified by so many.

Fish feel no pain. How can that be? In truth, it cannot be, and yet, many people consume fish as an alternative to meat consumption, accepting the illogical feel-good argument that fish do not react in pain as sharp knives slice through their bodies releasing organs, and through their heads, delivering to a fish its final conscious experience.  

I do not eat seafood because of health and ethical reasons. The primary reason to consume a plant-based diet is compassion for your own body and your health. Farm-raised fish are kept in horrendous conditions. Imagine thousands of fish living in a confined feeding and confined defecating man-made pond in which slime and fish feces are continuously consumed from bodies touching bodies in which fish are unable to swim, for lack of room. Farm-raised fish suffer this way throughout their cramped lives.

Ocean-raised fish swim free, but those creatures living atop their own food chain consume the pesticides and heavy metals (such as mercury) and dioxins and radioactive accidents from tens of thousands of meals from smaller creatures, which, in turn, have consumed millions of tainted and polluted diatoms.

Typical fishermen are armed with a pole and some hooks and some bait and a past history and a future intention. Yet, little thought is given to the thousands or millions of injuries which occur each year from lost or discarded monofilament fishing line, steel-tipped lures and hooks, and lead weights which become swallowed up by bottom-feeding fish.

Many creatures are intentionally impaled by fishing hooks. These bait animals include creatures able to writhe with pain such as tiny fish hooked through the eye socket, or frogs hooked through the leg and body.

Many sports fisherman catch and release their prey, out of compassion, mistakenly believing that such behavior extend a living creature's life. [Ed. Note: Sometimes cathch-and-release is the law, and sometimes it is done in order for there to continue to be fish for them to try to catch. ] In many cases, they pull out the animal's internal organs during the process of extracting a deeply embedded hook. Such do-gooders exhaust a fish during the hunt, and remove the protective mucus which covers their gills and scales. Fishing takes away from a sea creature's natural ability to defend itself.

Although fish cannot talk to express their pain, nor run away to elude a fisherman's knife, the fish nerves and feelings and death are all part of an experience which ends their lives with extreme pain and injustice.

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"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight."
 - Albert Schweitzer

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