The Animals Awake Ad and the issue of fishin’
by This ad by Dutch non-profit Animals Awake makes me livid. I’m actually ok with the imagery taken as is, and the shock factor doesn’t bother me — I can’t enjoy horror movies and pretend to be outraged by the bloodiness of this ad, and the argument that this clip encourages violence against women is completely off base because it’s intended to piss people off. What truly makes me angry is that focusing energy on a non-issue such as the way fish are gutted distracts from more concrete issues such as overfishing, the ecological impact of fishing, and the dependence of many economies on their fisheries.
To portray fisherman as cruel, heartless, brutish killers is classist and ignorant, seeing as most fishermen in the world fish out of necessity, and they’re going broke competing with each other for ever-dwindling catches. The people at Animals Awake have obviously never been fishing themselves — throughout human history, when we have fished, we pulled them out of the water, hit them on the head, and took out their guts. It’s nothing new, and there really isn’t anything wrong with it. The fact that we have industrialized the process is what causes all our problems, and since we can’t turn back the clock, it’s better to find ways to efficiently manage what resources we still have.
Animals Awake, PETA, and other such groups fail to understand the complexity of food production and our dependence on animals — fish guts are actually one of the best, most ecologically sound, and most ancient fertilizers, as is manure, both animal products that pretty much make any sort of non-industrial food off limits to vegans, who prefer to rely on petroleum to make their synthetic clothes and grow monoculture crops like wheat and soy for their fake meats.
We cannot remove animals from our food chain without causing environmental havoc and severely diminishing genetic diversity on the planet. It’s fine if you won’t eat meat for personal reasons, but there is no clear-cut answer to our global issues. Raising goats to rehabilitate and manage farmland as well as for meat, well-managed hunting, replenishing bison populations by creating an economic incentive to raise them, and diversifying rather than narrowing the number of species we eat can all be vital parts to creating a sustainable food system.
If you get hung up on getting fishermen to gently lull fish into comas before gutting them, then you’re fighting a losing battle and you’re wasting your time and energy
Tagged: Animals Awake Ad
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Nat said | 25 July, 2010
It seems like you have direct issues with animals awake and PETA and maybe it’s not this ad that really upsets you but those activists confronting you with an alternative point of view, just like your post confronted me, especially this – “hit them on the head, and took out their guts. It’s nothing new, and there really isn’t anything wrong with it.”
I read today that although there are systems in place to relieve the suffering that some other animals feel when they are being killed for human consumption (i.e. pigs, although these are largely ignored by industry), there is NO such system for fish and just because we have (as a society) not cared in the past about how we kill fish, surely, that’s not to say that we can’t improve our methods. And, why are you using a class argument to discount the damage of a commercial industry worth billions of dollars as if this issue was so black and white. Why should any animal be given precedence over another because tradition says it ok? we have come along way with science yet society rarely explores alternative methods for killng that will benefit the lives of animals but instead chooses to work towards a better bottom line that embeds the power that humans have garnered to sustain an unsustainable diet of meat with no regard for the environment or healthy living. ‘Eating Animals’ by Jonathan Safran Foer, is worth a read.