679:
Once upon a time
people were more in touch with how animal foods came to them. Long before ‘food
animals’ were held captive they were hunted, and without the use of
high-powered rifles and four wheel drive vehicles. Back then hunting might have
been essential for survival, but now it
isn’t. There is a kangaroo meat industry providing income in rural areas but
mostly the wild animal being hunted will
be hunted for recreation. The government are even encouraging this ‘sport’ into
National Parks, allowing people to shoot at ‘feral’ animals, causing terrible
injuries to the animals themselves and putting human Park users at risk.
Angling
The fishing
industry is denuding the oceans of fish with trawl nets hundreds of meters in
length, dredging up both target fish and many other non-target sea creatures
which are either too badly injured when caught and dragged to the surface in
the nets or which die in the process. Ecologically the damage to the sea
environment by large-scale fishing is well known, but little is being done about
it. On a smaller scale the very popular pastime of angling does terrible damage
too.
My next door neighbour hangs his
fishing rod over the sea wall to relax from his stressful job, as a chef. He’s
an intelligent, kind man and probably never thinks for a moment that the fish
he catches are sentient creatures who share with us very similar pain receptors
and nervous systems. He may not realize or want to know that the fish he hooks
will slowly suffocate to death over a period of twenty or so minutes.
He (like thousands of others) fishes
for fun, unconcerned about how fish feel when a barbed hook pierces the fish’s
mouth and is hauled out of the water and left to die a slow death. As a chef
he’s dealing with animals all the time, but his ‘working-animals’ are already
dead. He doesn’t have to make any connection between the living creature and
the body parts he uses. He simply cooks what his customers ask for (which is
mostly meat, sea foods and rich dairy concoctions) without any thought of
animals suffering or dying. Most people who go fishing care nothing for the
creatures they ‘catch’. It doesn’t occur to them that they are causing fish
such suffering.
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