Sunday, January 15, 2017

Statistics and Stories - Part 1


1893:

Edited by CJ Tointon



Joseph Stalin: “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic”



I'll tell you a story of a fish, known to his friends as Harold. Not so very long ago, Harold was happily swimming along in the sea, minding his own business. Suddenly, travelling fast behind him, came a rumbling, grinding, frightening noise. He'd heard this noise before, but from a distance, never this close.



Next thing he knew, a massive, dragging bar, weighing down a floating, balloon-shaped net, catches up behind him. It scoops him up, lifting him to the surface. As he begins to die slowly, suffocating and being crushed beneath the weight of the bodies of many other sea friends who'd also been caught in the net, he fought to stay alive. But the crush of the other creatures struggling and pressing into Harold, only ended when the net was emptied of its slithering mass. It tumbled onto the deck of a ship. Harold gasped, in agony, for a full twenty minutes before he finally died.

                                                                                           The End….



You might feel the horror of this little story, but it's not the full story - it's eighty-five billion times worse! Last year, the oceans were plundered to the tune of 85,000,000,000 Harolds and Haroldesses. Humans don't seem to care anymore. Humanity has lost its humaneness. We convince ourselves that to eat animals, is to love animals, illustrating the nonsense which is at the heart of our conditioning. Nothing seems to stir us into action if it goes against our self-interest and statistics just numb the imagination. Eightyfivebillion - how can we even conceive such a number?

Multiply one fish by 85 million, then multiply that figure by one thousand. You arrive at the unimaginable figure of 85 billion - the number of individual fish being taken out of their environment each year - just so humans can eat them.



Harold was both crushed and suffocated to death. His demise is not just a statistic, it's a story of yet another untimely death - for no reason other than to titivate the taste buds of humans. If we don't like what the story tells us, we might decide to stop eating fish. But to not eat fish might feel like doing something unpleasant to ourselves, like a self-punishment. What vegans advocate in boycotting products (on behalf of Harold and his mates) sits against the whole remembered experience of the tastes and textures of one's favourite fish dish. The remembered pleasure is potent enough to cancel out any dry old statistic - hence the phrase, "lies, damned lies and statistics". Most humans immunise themselves against the emotional impact of certain selected, unpleasant facts, hence our conditioning makes the size of statistics meaningless.



We may try to push them away, but some statistics are haunting. If we are able to feel less for a fish in the ocean than for a creature with legs or wings, we face a similar, but slightly different problem even more diabolical to deal with - the conditions of animals held in captivity.

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