I always found it interesting how people make a difference between certain species of animals. I've talked about speciesism as a whole in my previous post, but today I thought I'd talk about fish, why vegans don't eat them and the environmental impact of eating fish as well. As always I will start from an ethical point of view.
If we look at the amount of fish that are killed each year the numbers are shocking! 60 billion land animals (meaning pigs, chickens etc.) vs 1-2.7 trillion marine animals are killed each year. Those numbers are very big and it has a not so positive impact on the oceans but let's take it from a different perspective for now, I'll get to that later on! So do fish feel pain? Lot's of people think they don't, but that's not true. Fish do actually feel pain, they are just not vocal about it like a pig would be. They suffer in silence most of the time. Fish have emotions, they have feelings and they are intelligent and they remember each other, the place they live at or where they've been to before!
The equivalent to factory farming for marine animals is aquafarming. They spend their entire lives in concrete tanks or sea cages, where they are overcrowded and they often die in there. Fish are either beaten to death, electrocuted or hit on the head and then they are left to bleed out. Outside of these fishing farms, there are methods that are just are cruel used in the commercial fishing industries. For example, there are huge fishing nets used that catch big amounts of fish at a time. Fish get trapped and strangled in these nets and they often suffocate for many hours before being pulled out. However those who survive and are still alive when they get pulled up are gutted alive. Those fish that are kept in tanks overcrowded often develop diseases as a result so they are injected with anti-biotics. For a fish to die from suffocation it can take anything from 50 minutes up to 4 hours of suffering. Some fish even stay conscious after they've been gutted. I mean imagine that so horrible!
From an environmental perspective eating fish isn't good either. The big fishing nets with weights on them used in commercial fishing cause damage to the ocean floors as it's being dragged to catch fish, but there also is a huge amount of by catch that comes with this method. Meaning dolphins and sharks can get caught as well. The second most used method of catching fish is the long line fishing. This means that there are hundreds and thousands of bait hooks attached to long nets, these are up to a 100 km long. By catch is also an issue here. 50 billion sharks and other marine animals get caught, unintentionally as a by product of this method. This is much more than the number of fish that are intentionally caught. This is a huge problem because it caused and continues to cause many different species of marine animals to go extinct. A big amount of fish that are caught get fed to other fish or even pigs and chickens. Therefore, it is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, land use etc.
There are a lot of fishing nets and a lot of plastic left in the oceans which causes additional harm to turtles, dolphins and other species as they can often get caught up in them and these fishing nets can cause harm to their bodies. We could have fishless oceans by 2048! That's how bad the impact humans have caused by fishing is!
So what can you do to stop causing more damage to the oceans and marine life? Well the best thing you can do is very simple, stop eating fish! If you do eat fish you are contributing to all of this unnecessary damage and suffering to fish and the oceans!
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