"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
Jeremy Bentham, philosopher
Isn't it funny how perceptions and habits can change over time? There was a very good fish restaurant in West Portal in San Francisco called Pisces a long time ago, maybe the late 1970's. I had just gotten a promotion at work and I wanted to celebrate, and the best way I could think of to do that was to go to Pisces and order the lobster. Very expensive and luxurious. And of course they brought a live lobster to my table and I had to say yes, that one will do, and they boiled him up and I gobbled all of him down, happy as a . . . clam or something. (Gee, I wonder where the phrase happy as a clam came from. Just how happy are they?)
I would not do that now, and I cringe when I think of it, but I was blind in a way, and bought into that denial system we use to boil beings alive--that they don't feel anything. It makes me sad whenever I think about it.
Freezing . . . interesting concept. I used to keep goldfish. I would rescue tiny ones from the feeder tank--the ones the stores sell to people who are going to feed them alive to their tropical fish. I would bring them home and several years later they were six or eight inches long--very pretty and happy. Goldfish often live to be about fourteen! The current record is over 30 years, in fact. I don't think everyone knows this, but goldfish are the Buddhists of fish. They are very peaceful and tranquil, and if you put little baby goldfish in with others that are thousands of times bigger, the big fish still will not eat the little ones, unlike some other species.
Well, because I had goldfish I was interested in their care, and I read an article that said the humane thing to do when one was listing badly and obviously dying was to gently fish it out of the tank with a net and put it on a plate in the freezer, and death would come quickly and softly. I never had to do that, because my fish lived seemingly forever and I finally gave them all back to the pet store when we left San Francisco, but I was talking about it once with my stockbroker, and he said he had heard that the correct way to help a sick goldfish die was to drop her in boiling water, and he did that, and she died an excruciating death, like the lobster, and he was horrified, and sad for a very long time. He was telling me this story years after his goldfish died . . . |
