I wanted to emphasize that the final part of the article links to Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch, which is a great way to identify which fish are coming from a sustainable fishery, and are okay to eat: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/
Cannery Row used to be the site of extremely unsustainable sardine fishing. They used to pump sardines out of the ocean with essentially fire hoses. Until one year there just weren't any. People would ask "where did all the sardines go?" and the answer was "they went into cans".
It took over 50 years for the fish population to recover but the fish canning industry went extinct there first.
It’s hard to tell but you could research the types of fish plus the methods it’s caught. Lots of fish need to be bled out so they are incapacitated before bleeding. You can kill a fish instantly by a brain spike (ikejime) or bash to the head with a blunt object. As you said some fish are just thrown on ice but it can depend on the species. Even worse, methods are going to vary wildly from fishermen to fishermen and region to region. Wild caught is probably better than farm raised death wise.
I would be curious to hear your reasoning or evidence for this. From what I know, the ability to control conditions and processes is much easier in the farm context.
Here’s a link.[1] I’d rather have a person doing the work.
I disagree that having a person rather than a machine process food products is related to the ethics of animal consumption, but I tend to think about this stuff in terms of how do you continue to feed 9B people, around 3B of whom rely on seafood for their primary protein source. I consider it a great privilege to buy bespoke premium products that cater to my perceptions of the world, but it doesn't really solve the problems around mass producing enough healthy food to sustainably feed the world population. Having a human handle all of those dead fish and turn them into marketable products would drive their price up so much that it would push people to protein sources that are much more carbon-, water-, and nutrient-intensive. Making the processing humane is super important, but it needs to be rational and efficient.
I also agree that our perception of farm conditions for fish is probably not as accurate as for other animals.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/08/farmed-fish-fe...
[2]: https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/fish-producers-benefi...
[3]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/are.14857
some methods are better than others (i.e., minimize suffering), but no slaughter is humane.
Yes, there are times when euthanasia may be appropriate - but it’s tough still to mete out the morality when no intent or consent is communicated, no?
Most “cruelty free” labeling is also farcical, unfortunately. The amount of suffering involved with animal agriculture is repulsively shocking when fully grasped, and difficult to unsee unless willful ignorance takes the proverbial wheel.
Some people view killing animals for food as entirely humane, which is to say some combination of natural and ethical. You may not view any kind of animal slaughter as humane, but if pressed could you describe how humane your soy, wheat, etc. production is?
Surely you can figure out how eating beans is a little more kind.
Most increase in land-based agricultural productivity in this day and age comes from intensification on existing land or removal of forested habitats. Those come at a huge cost to biodiversity and ecosystem services. They also have social costs to other humans.
> "Surely you can figure out how eating beans is a little more kind." I don't think this snarkiness is very productive, but I'm super used to hearing this sentiment; often the people who express this type of idea have really good intentions that I am totally aligned with, but they also fall into logical fallacies usually due to missing information around ecology, agriculture, and food systems. It makes perfect sense if you take a very narrow view of how food is produced and what alternatives there are for land and water use: just eat a bean because it doesn't scream! Totally. But growing that bean comes at a cost and ignoring that because you read Sinclair or can afford to shop for high-end foods isn't helpful. I think it is a fantasy to suggest that the problems will be solved if peoples and cultures around the world just subscribe to my view of what is ethical or desirable.
Any fish would prefer you eat a bean. But the animals and plants that would use the land on which its grown would prefer you eat a fish. Those of us working to build sustainable food systems that minimize the overall impact on natural systems, biodiversity, and ecosystem services will fail if we take such a simplistic and naive view of the tradeoffs.
I described it as unnecessary, because eating animals is simply not necessary to sustain a long, healthy life. Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
The vast majority (>75%) of soybeans grown are simply to feed cattle. The majority of rainforests being cleared in Brazil are for cattle. Animal agriculture is the leading contributor for GHG and anthropogenic climate change. Plenty of data breakdowns can be found here: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use , but this shouldn't be news to you.
Snarkiness is hard to avoid when you're legitimately attempting to compare the humanity of an industry responsible for killing 100 billion animals each year versus growing and eating plants; it's like comparing Hitler to a person who kills a housefly.
You wanna minimize your impact to natural systems and biodiversity? Stop eating animals. Peter Singer is a great place to approach the issue from a modern, truly ethical lens.
Hopefully we both can rid ourselves of simplistic and naive views, but for now, discussions about how we should best function in this universe ought to be had.
I also tried to point out the inherit issue with the comparison of "killing 100 billion animals each year" with "growing and eating plants" as though the latter avoids all 100 billion animal deaths. It doesn't. It might move those deaths to other species that you care less about or to a different time or make them lives that never existed rather than lives taken, but it still comes at a cost. So your premise is just incomplete and focuses entirely on the issue that seems to be most important to you personally.
If "you" want to minimize your impact, stop eating animals is an argument that only works for a subset of the human population and is only an accessible solution to a fraction of that. Putting aside the gross ethnocenctricity, it simply is not going to work as a solution. The converse is that "some land is not suitable for crop agriculture but is usable for grazing" and I also routinely see that argument abused even though it is true. Some livestock are raised totally sustainably and even provide ecosystem services (trampling is good for some systems and cattle do it in lieu of the native grazers that are now gone). But that doesn't mean that all cattle can be raised at no cost. You're making that argument, just about row crops, I guess.
FWIW, soy production in Brazil in the service of foreign markets is... not very sustainable even if it's not for feed [1].
I remember when I was younger and I was like, "I survive fine on <2 gallons of fresh water a day... how can there possibly be a water supply issue anywhere?" Or, more generally, "I can modify my behavior with few personal consequences to fit into a sustainable model." So that is great. Do it. But I would argue you are avoiding grappling with the full impacts of your own choices and, even if they'd be better alternatives anyway, you're failing to recognize that your choices are not available to everyone.
In any case, the act of killing a sentient being is wrong. We've got that more or less universally codified for other humans (and most pets); seems we may just need a few more uncomfortable ethical discussions before we reach consistency.