It's a caution, Litho Grise, why only yesterday I saw a postal worker wolfing down a sandwich of bacalao de profundidad. When I approached the nefarious agent de extinction, I questioned him blithely about the identity of the piscine product, only to get a guilty, furtive, grin. "Don't let the boss know I am eating Chilean Sea Bass on duty, he will think I purloined it from a Purolator shipment. If they don't catch you on camera, they can dismiss you." Quickly he picked up the sandwich, stepped in front of the hidden camera marked with a sign saying, "Caution: Postal Employees being Watched at This Location by Hidden Camera, to Enforce Workplace Honesty", smacked his lips and burped loudly, taking a long swig on a Doctor Pepper. "There," he said, "it's on record that I was eating illegal, unrecorded and unregulated fish products not at break times, but they can't do a thing. I had better open a few of these packages in an obvious way, if it's ever said I was stealing illegal Toothfish. We want it to be from a record that the Union can say is an invasion of privacy. Last time they caught us stealing on a hidden camera, they had to give the stolen goods back to us, and our jobs too."
I could not help but notice through all this that the visage of Britney Spears smiled from the can of Dr. Pepper. I wondered whether she would approve. If it were not for people in her position reminding us that we just cannot go plundering nature endlessly, where would the world be? I resolved to write the Spokesperson of the Toothfish a sobering letter. Her beloved finny friends were being devastated in the far off not-so Pacific. A school was screaming for help, as only schools of fish could scream. The once powerful Royal Navy of GBR, now only few dilapitated wooden coastal patrol boats, was powerless to help. Once it had ruled the waves of the world, making the name Brittania feared in every two-bit fishing port in the South Pacific. Not one illegal netter would dare venture as much as a mile offshore, if it were even rumoured the British Fleet was likely to show up.
Now they laugh. "We fish the Toothfish as much as we want. The Yankees don care, the British have no boats, the French can't find us and the Aussies can be paid off. We laugh at them. Toothfishing is good."
We question the Poacher still further about his antideluvian attitude towards conservation. "What does he think about species depradation? Does he not think it is a danger that the fish species will be extinguished?"
"We catch lots of fish", says Juan Manuel, our fish pirate. "The sea is big. There is no shortage that I can see. The big countries just want it all for themselves", he spits. "It's taxes, they want money from the little guy, or haven't you noticed?"
EC<:-} |
