Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Killing in the wild & Angling


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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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