On fish III (The future of fish rights.)

I've been writing about fish quite a lot recently. I guess it's because I had to admit that I'd been irrational spending all my energy fighting for the rights of prettier animals, while ignoring the uglier ones.

I stumbled upon the music video of Clean Bandit - Rather Be ft. Jess Glynne and shit, it depressed me for a moment.

The video includes several images of some sort of marketplace where people are virtually torturing living fish. The protagonist is this Japanese hipster girl who's apparently some kind of chef. The video has millions of views and thousands and thousands of likes. There are dislikes; I wonder how many of them have anything to do with the cruelty to the animals.

It's distressing as fuck to realize that so many (or most - depends on the country, etc.) people are able to look at a fish in distress and not see anything wrong going on at all. If the same distress was inflicted on a puppy, people would be extremely upset. And the only, only relevant difference is that fish are not cute and do not communicate the way mammals do.

Notice how the actress (Haruka Abe) treats her cuddly cat so nicely, but smiles blank-eyedly when fish are treated like crap?

It's weird. For me, it's not difficult at all to see fish as the quite highly developed animals that they are. Fish are not stupid. Fish are not simple. According to science, they are a lot smarter than what the people hurting them would usually like to think. They have excellent memories and beat even non-human primates in some cognitive areas. To me, this is all very obvious, as I've actually hung out with them.

The fact is: so far, the only 'moral difference' between a puppy and a fish is that a puppy is cute and a fish is not. That deludes us into thinking that hurting a fish is not as bad a crime as hurting a puppy. That's it. From a scientific perspective, we've yet to find out any morally meaningful biological/cognitive difference.

Shit. People are irrational. It seems that maybe 1-2% of people base their reactions on information and logic. Be it about fellow humans or other animals, for most people moral decisions are really all about who's cute and who's not.

In terms of inflicted suffering, commercial fishing (including fish farming) is definitely one of the greatest ethical problems on the planet at the moment. Objectively, it's hard to find anything else that would cause as much unnecessary distress. Not even the modern meat industry. (Although, I'd like to see the fishing industry as a part of the modern meat industry.) I'm afraid that as a species, humans are biologically incapable of fishing without causing significant distress to the animal.

Once again, in vitro technology has the potential to fix this problem. Nothing else will fix it. I want to believe that some day, sooner or later, we'll live in a world where harming fish (and non-human animals in general) is illegal, and the overwhelming majority of fish that people eat is lab-grown. There's a long way to go and I'll most likely die before that day becomes reality, but I'd like to see the world strongly starting to move in the right direction.

In terms of the future of fish rights, there are several things to point out:

1:

One of the most important effects of lab-grown animal products is the psychological one. Once we reach a situtation where we can eat meat/fish/other animal products without actually harming and eating animals, we'll lose the psychological need to downplay the cognitive abilities and moral importance of the animals we're now eating. So, when it becomes possible to eat fish products without harming actual fish, the idea of fish rights will be a lot easier to grasp. You can be strongly for animal rights and at the same time, keep eating animal products. The Average Jonathan won't have to give up anything.

2:

Buying and eating commercial animal products is not the only thing that can create the psychological need to belittle other animals' cognition. There are a lot of people who fish. If a person is an angler, they usually want to see fish as as numb and dumb as possible. Hurting someone almost always requires denying the pain of the victim.

So, even if more and more people stop eating animals and start eating lab-grown animal products instead, and therefore start looking at animals (including fish) differently, there'll still be people who want to see animals as toys. But, at least in the Western world, the reality is: most people do not fish. It's a relatively popular pastime, but most people never do it themselves, and the people who do fish are clearly a minority.

So, if the majority of people start taking the welfare of fish seriously, there'll begin to be more and more social and cultural pressure on the minority that's still fishing. It'll be a lot more difficult to get away with poor excuses and claims that fish are nothing but swimming plants. The minority will start to lose. There'll be laws, there'll be change, and some day angling will generally be considered a Wrong Thing to do. -> There'll be virtually nobody angling, and the need to understate the cognition of fish will disappear for good.

(Of course, private angling itself is a very minor ethical problem compared to the commercial fishing industry. The greatest problem with private angling is the psychological impact it has: making it acceptable to hurt fish and therefore making the commercial fishing industry possible.)

According to a chart I saw somewhere, right now about 20% of (British?) people agree with the statement "Angling is a cruel pastime" (5 % strongly agree), whereas a little over 25% don't know, and a little over 50% disagree. (These percentages must vary a lot depending on the country.) My prediction is that before this century reaches its end, the first percentage will be clearly over 50%.

3:

There is a danger that the animal rights movement will concentrate on the rights of animals that look cute and relatively human-like – instead of focusing on the ones that need the most help. At the moment, this is the reality. Animal activism in general is based on rational arguments, but it's a fact that we tend to fight harder for those with expressive faces and human-like characteristics.

This is not only bad. It seems clear that in order to get to a point where fish welfare becomes an ok thing to talk about, we must start with easier questions. When the rights of the cuter animals – mammals and birds – become a cultural no-brainer, the fight for fish rights will finally get all the space it needs.

And whenever the campaigning for fish rights truly begins, the campaings need to concentrate on educating people powerfully as fuck about 1) the cognitive abilities of fish, 2) the way commercial fishing and fish farming actually happen. This must happen in an informative and psychologically smart kind of way. Get rid of ignorance. -> Get rid of violence.

Besides: in 2014 (1914), even the cute animals like cows and pigs get tortured in completely unbearable ways. A lot of people are full of irrational justifications for this, too; therefore it's not very surprising that their reaction to the idea of fish rights is highly reluctant. If pigs don't have rights, how could fish have rights?

A world that treats the cute animals with respect is going to be very different from the world of today. Such a world will most likely be psychologically very different from the one I see today when I look out the bus window: the animal rights people will generally be considered The Good Guys that were right; more and more people will see the mere act of killing an animal for food as unnecessary; funny slogans like Meat is Murder will be something that many average meat-eaters actually believe in; and so on.

I can't wait.

4:

Ultimately, the question is: if I care, why wouldn't other people care?

Here's a fun fact: once a human animal decides to care about x or y, it cares about x or y. It's a psychological mechanism: when a human decides to start identifying as someone who cares about children/cats/slaves/fish, they truly and genuinely start caring about children/cats/slaves/fish.

All you have to do is to make the decision to start giving a shit. All that comes then is so very easy. And if you are born into a society that sees Giving a Shit as a matter of course, you won't even have to make a conscious decision to start caring.

It starts happening in our brain, slowly, intuitively, steadily – and then, when we see an old Clean Bandit video from the beginning of the century, about a girl laughing at suffocating fish, we'll see it very, very differently than people did back in 2013-2014.

Fun.

To care about human rights is a collective choice. Now, after thousands of years, we've finally made that (strange and deeply unnatural) choice. Similarly, to start caring about animal rights will be a collective choice. I've made that (strange and deeply unnatural) choice, and if humanity is going to behave and progress in a way I expect it to, it will follow. Some people always have to be the first ones to take the essential steps.

At the moment, many people who end up going vegan start with the concern about factory-farmed mammals. Then birds. Later, they start caring about fish. Mark my words: this is also how it's going to happen for us as societies.

_____________________


Btw... I think that people already do care about fish; they only have to stop and really look at what's happening to them:

Look at the comments below the video!:

So, once again I end a sad piece of writing with this statement:

I guess the future will be significantly brighter. (Bring on the in vitro fish.)