PETA India
Jun 24, 20214 min
1. Fish feel
Each fish is an individual with a unique personality and the desire to live. Fish experience pain in a way similar to humans, communicate in complex ways (herrings, for example, signal each other by farting), and can feel fear.
When massive commercial fishing nets rip animals from their homes, pack them so tightly that their eyes may burst out of their skulls, drag their sensitive scales along the ocean floor, and force them to undergo decompression – which often ruptures their bladders and pushes their stomachs out of their mouths – fish likely experience an excruciating, terrifying journey to the surface. Then, if they are still alive, fishers often cut their gills and leave them to bleed out or toss them onto the ice to freeze or suffocate slowly. You wouldn’t want to be kicked, thrown, suffocated, or hacked to death on a chopping block – and neither do they.
Companies use deceptive labels (aka “greenwashing”) to dupe consumers into believing that killing certain types of fish for food is “sustainable”, but they’re all misleading. For example, it’s estimated that the Scottish salmon-farming industry produces as much organic waste as the entire human population of Scotland does each year, yet the fish flesh that it sells is marketed as “sustainably produced”. Commercial fishing is even more damaging than oil spills – the fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico destroyed more animals in a single day than the largest oil spill in history, Deepwater Horizon, did in months.
There isn’t even an agreed-upon definition of the term “sustainable” among marine “conservation” groups, so any such label is pretty much meaningless. There’s no way to decimate wildlife populations sustainably. The only truly sustainable and ethical choice is to leave fish in peace and go vegan.
Yes, you read that right. The oceans will be empty by 2048 unless we take action now, and there aren’t plenty of fish in the sea. We must stop supporting the greedy and cruel fishing industry, which kills 2.7 trillion fish every year. Fish play a vital role in sustaining the ocean’s entire ecosystem, and without them, other animals – including corals, whales, dolphins, and sea birds – would starve and die.
Heartbreaking videos of sea turtles with straws stuck in their nostrils have persuaded many restaurants and consumers to switch to paper or ditch straws altogether. That’s a good thing, but it’s a drop in the ocean – plastic straws kill 1,000 sea turtles globally every year. But in the US alone, for example, fishing vessels capture, injure, or kill an estimated 250,000 sea turtles annually.
Hardly anyone is addressing the rubbish heap in the room: straws account for 0.03% of plastic in the ocean, while nearly half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of – you guessed it – fishing nets.
5. Commercial fishing is never “dolphin-safe”.
“Dolphin-safe” labels on tuna cans may make consumers feel better, but they’re worth less than the paper that they’re printed on. Every year, 300,000 dolphins and whales are killed after being caught in fishing nets – and because overfishing has depleted so many fish populations, fishers in certain areas routinely slaughter dolphins they view as “competition”. One “dolphin-safe” tuna-fishing vessel slaughtered 45 dolphins to catch eight tuna – and no tuna is “tuna-safe”!
How can you know your eating habits won’t endanger any animals? Just go vegan. It’s that simple!
Ali Tabrizi, Seaspiracy director: I realized the single best thing I could do every single day to protect the ocean and the marine life I loved, is to simply not eat them.
It’s not too late to start protecting fish who are killed by an industry destroying the entire ocean.
Source: PETA India
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