Crossposted from my blog.  The horror of fish farmingOne of my professors in college taught a class about effective altruism—a social movement about doing good effectively. Whenever he was talking about the scale of animal suffering, all the statistics he talked about were about the suffering of non-fish. It became a running joke—friends and I would make jokes like the following: “a gunman robs a bank, kills over 4 non-fish” or “one (non-fish) death is a tragedy, a million fish deaths are a statistic.” But this professor, despite explicitly ignoring fish whenever he talked about a problem, was nonetheless more pro-fish than almost all people. Because no one cares about fish—at all.I remember when I was young, my grandmother would take me and my brother fishing. This was seen as a totally innocuous, fun way to spend a weekend. The general attitude towards fishing is almost exactly opposite to the attitude towards, for example, hunting: liberal parents in blue states are not happy letting their children hunt land creatures, the way they are happy to let their children hunt fish. This is unsettling—hooking fish into the mouth to yank them out of the water so that they suffocate to death [...]---
First published:
July 26th, 2023

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kwxE7HYjRpYwSEiKb/underwater-torture-chambers-the-horror-of-fish-farming
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