Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Sticking up for our fish against humanity
I’m 15. Shaved hair and DIY piercings. I’ve just attended my first music festival in Tākaka and my friends drop me off in French Pass for a camping holiday with my father, his girlfriend and her young children.
Day one we head out on a boat for a fishing expedition. It’s sunny, gorgeous even. We’re all pumped. I’m happy to be there. Loving the outdoors, the fresh air.
Someone’s rod pulls, excitement takes over the boat. The fish is reeled in with glee. The kids get out their “whacking sticks” and giggle with delight as they jump around smacking the fish to death. It flops around on the floor of the boat, taking a long time to die. I watch it all unfold, curled into a ball in the corner.
When we return to the shore I tearfully tell my father I will not be eating animals any more. And I never did.
Hard to relate? What if it had been a cat being killed to the soundtrack of giggles?
Fish are sentient, both scientifically and legally. For a long time it was thought that they don’t feel pain but that myth has been thoroughly debunked. The science even says that they have feelings and thoughts. So why do we treat them so differently to other sentient beings? Why is it so easy to dismiss their suffering?
It feels like a failure of imagination. We understand that dogs matter because they’re familiar. We look into their big eyes and we see something familiar in them. They follow instructions and respond to our needs.
We know that pigs are smarter than dogs. That cows have emotions. Yet none of that changes how we treat “commodi
ty” animals versus “companion” animals. We intellectually know they’re all living beings and have legal and moral rights but species-ism has nothing to do with intellectualism. It has everything to do with empathy. And our tendency to pick and choose to whom we extend it.
Empathy stems from the brain lighting up when we observe someone else perform an action in the same way as if we had performed that action ourselves. So when a human or animal behaves in a way we recognise, it’s easier to care about them. This gives an automatic advantage to land animals when seeking kindness from humans. Slimy water creatures are
an extra step removed from our human experience, so it’s harder for us to care about them.
It’s interesting that we make an exception to the slimy water animal rule for dolphins and whales. They’ve proven their intelligence and “human-like behaviours” sufficiently for us to value them.
Those poor dumb fish don’t deserve decency because of their little brains and propensity to follow each other around. Although so do birds, and we revere them. Kill a bird for fun and it’s a symptom of psychopathy. Meanwhile every second dude on a dating app is proudly posing with the dead body of a fish, and walls across the world are strewn with their trophy corpses.
Aotearoa is considered the sustainable fish-farming capital of the world, as promoted in our salmon industry’s PR campaigns. Of course it’s completely untrue but who cares, right? It’s just fish.
It’s also our oceans though. And we love swimming. From an environmental perspective, New Zealand’s salmon farming is a disaster. It just happens to be moderately better than some overseas, hence the successful spin. But it’s still destroying our coastlines and waterways. It’s also absolutely brutal on the fish. The welfare guidelines for fish farming were created (and are policed) by the industry itself; those whose financial interests are in conflict with animal welfare.
Extreme crowding, disease, spine deformation and anxiety are just some of the well-documented and common aspects of intensive salmon farming. As an accepted industry standard, 20% of fish will die prematurely, usually from stress or disease.
The most toxic effect of Aotearoa’s greenwashing campaign is gaslighting Kiwis into thinking our own backyards are 100% pure when in fact our short-sighted choices have led to unswimmable rivers and beaches, and once arable land being raped beyond all use.
It’s time for us to move away from further intensification of retro proteins and invest in sustainable, future-focused industries that bring economic gains to this country without destroying it.