Why Do We Always Forget About The Fish?

Friends, not food

I get asked why I boycott animal products a lot - probably because boycotting them is a bit odd. It’s less weird now than it was before. I certainly feel for the people who had to be vegan in the 90’s. What sadder image could we possibly conjure up than a single diner in hammer pants, staring down in defeat at a lettuce sandwich? (I was only a toddler back then, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it was like).

Still, I’m anomalous enough that people ask me about my reasons, and when I explain that I think the ethical arguments are sound, the people I speak to fall into two camps. Either they argue back (Which is fun! If you’re reading this and want to put pressure on my views in real life, do it! I don’t think it’s rude, I like talking about it) or they try to extend an olive branch and speak about their own reduction.

One of the more popular responses that I hear is “I’m vegetarian! Well, vegetarian, but I still eat fish”. This one always bewilders me, because I’m not sure why our poor aquatic friends are always the last in line for our empathy. Well, I take that back, I think I have a rough idea. It’s probably because they look weird as hell. It’s hard to relate with them when they’re out here, strutting their stuff like this.

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“Martin, 34, looking for a special lady. I like NASCAR, and hate long walks on the beach.”

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Clearly, their looks are playing with our psychology somewhat, but any rational person would agree that the mere fact that someone is weird and gross looking, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give them moral consideration. After all, we still think your mum deserves to live.

So, here are some reasons to welcome fish into the family. For too long have they been considered our weird second cousins twice removed that we only see at funerals and weddings!

We’ve been lied to. They do feel pain.

I was watching an episode of Seinfeld recently where Elaine gets into an altercation with a woman wearing a fur coat. Elaine actually says the very thing I mention above, and describes herself as a vegetarian that eats fish. The woman accuses her of hypocrisy (which is beside the point!), and Elaine responds that “fish feel no pain”. I had actually forgotten how prevalent this belief was until a couple of months ago, when someone said those same exact words to me.

I’m not sure where this belief came from. It must have been a myth perpetuated by Big Fishing to convince us to buy hooks and bait - but if you review the evidence, you’ll find that a myth is exactly what it is.

Fish have brains and pain receptors, and they respond negatively to harmful stimuli. Additionally, they stop responding to harmful stimuli if they’re given painkillers. We certainly have enough reasons to at least give them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the problem when making claims about anyone’s phenomenal consciousness is that there’s always some party pooper that says “How do you know? Prove it!”, and the answer is always “We can’t”. You can’t prove beyond any doubt that fish feel pain, but you can’t prove beyond any doubt that anyone feels pain. It could be that no one around you even exists. You could be in an asylum right now, bashing your head against the wall, hallucinating this entire blog (in which case, your subconscious is so talented and right about everything - bravo).

I think the demand for proof is a dead end. You can’t prove anything with certainty, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t justified in having some beliefs. Instead, we should talk about the strength of our reasons for and against a belief - and we certainly have strong enough reasons to think fish feel pain. We feel pain, and we react to harm sufficiently similarly to fish that I think it would be a dubious assumption to think there’s no lights on in their heads.

They’re small, and that matters

I think the order in which aspiring vegans give up animal products is incorrect. We often go for the animals that plausibly have the most moral worth first - but then we always fail to take the animal’s size into account. I have a friend who, while thinking aloud about animal rights, once said “Hmm, maybe I’ll just eat chicken”. He thought this because it’s very plausible that cows and pigs have more moral worth than chickens, however were he to do this it would probably be disastrous.

Chickens are tiny, so in order to get the same amount of calories, we have to kill an enormous number of them. Most of the land animals we kill each year are chickens by a landslide.

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This isn’t because we’re all eating tons more chicken than beef, it’s because chickens are small and cows are big. Per kilo of meat produced, 0.58 chickens are killed, while only 0.01 cows are killed.

So how does this apply to fish? Well, it’s even worse. The number of fish lives lost per kilo is 2.27! Which means, in terms of lives lost, eating fish is 227x worse than eating cows. Even if fish have less moral value than cows, it’s implausible that they’re worth 227x times less - so prioritising abstaining from beef over abstaining from fish is actually counter productive (at least in terms of the direct affect on animals. The greenhouse gas emissions from beef are diabolical).

Quick disclaimer: You might read this and think that I think eating beef is fairly trivial because the number of lives lost per kilo is so low. I don’t. Death isn’t the only bad thing about eating animals. There’s a lot of exploitation and torture along the way too.

Fish are not free

One attempted saving grace of eating fish is that they get to live good lives before we eat them. They swim free, instead of rotting in one of our deplorable factory farms, so the amount of suffering caused really just amounts to the pain of killing (which is only being suffocated and stabbed to death! Childs play).

Unfortunately, this narrative hasn’t been true for a long time. In 2020, 49% of fish eaten came from farms. Up from just 26% in 2000 - so it’s likely to be more than 50% in 2024. What are fish farms like? Well, here’s a description from one undercover report.

• Workers’ abusive handling of fish, including slamming and stomping on fish, and violently throwing fish, including treating them like basketballs performing “trick shots”

•  Workers cruelly killing fish by slamming them on the ground 

• Live fish have their eyes eaten by fish who are underfed and hungry and mistake their pupils as food 

• Ineffective anesthetization during vaccination and fin clipping 

• Fish thrown into buckets and left to suffocate in piles of the dead and dying 

• Conditions so filthy that fish must be vaccinated 

• Painful spinal deformities, and fungus growth on fish intended for human consumption, including fungus eating away at the faces of the fish 

• Extreme crowding in barren conditions and high death rates of eggs and fish

You can read about the practices in more detail on a post from Bentham’s Newsletter here. One particularly sad phenomenon is that of “drop outs”. Still living fish that exhibit the brain activity and behaviors of depressed people, floating to the water’s surface without moving. I think Matthew hits the nail on the head when he says

Here’s a plausible principle: if a being is conscious enough to essentially get depression, we should not put them in situations where a greater population of them does get depression than there are humans on earth.

He’s right! Billions and billions of sentient beings giving up on life because they live in utter torment is very bad, and totally not worth the gains we make from it. The image of a noble fisherman, catching the fish of the day and bringing it to market is outdated. The majority of them live in shit and parasite infested hellholes (and even if they didn’t, suffocating someone to death for one meal is still terrible).

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The fact that so many people see what happens to land animals in animal agriculture and want to make a move away from it is really great. Those animals deserve to be free, and they should get more attention than the mainstream currently gives them - but it’s wrongheaded to replace exploiting them with exploiting fish. That’s just moving things around instead of making progress. Fish are the forgotten victims of animal exploitation, and they deserve to be seen as moral patients just as much as anyone else - even if they do look a bit weird.

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Except this one. This guy’s cute.

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