Today when I got up from my sleep, and watched the news (BBC Breakfast), one of the topics was a recent act to grant fishermen the right to get a license allowing them to shoot Grey Seals if they raid there nets. The actual fishermen really like this new act, since for them seals are a real pest. However the council in the areas surrounding these waters feel they make more of a profit out of tourists coming to see these seals, and therefore don’t like the idea of people killing them. Then there are the conservationists who don’t like the idea of these seals being killed, and want them to be protected by the law. After the report was done, the highly tedious follow up of people sending in their comments on the topic via E-mail, text or telephone etc. Dam, I can’t find the quotes to copy and paste either way, one of them went...
“Seals need to eat fish to survive, we eat fish for pleasure, I find this barbaric.”
I actually felt slightly angry having to write that quote so I may have missed a few points.
This is an example of how the Anti-Humans are corrupting the moral compass of the British people. Who ever wrote this and the previous quote is acting like Grey Seals are equals with us Homo sapiens, no they are not, I would say that they have the same cognitive capacity of a dog or a wolf, and should be regarded by the law and public at that level as well. If a dog kills a sheep or even causes a sheep to miscarry, it would get shot in the head. Prove me if I’m wrong but I’m sure that would be the case with wolves in places like Canada or Russia. So, why not have a similar situation with Grey seals.
Going back to the point of the quote, just saying that one eats fish for pleasure is a gross generalisation. A lot of people eat fish as an alternative to mammal and poultry, this is because it has lots of polyunsaturated fats which are good for clearing cholesterol from ones arteries, and they are much less intelligent than birds or mammals (I by the way am not one of these people, but a good friend of mine is.) It is true that Humans are omnivores and can eat whatever we like (just as long as it is balanced, other wise you’d get a lack of one thing and an excess of the other) whilst Grey seals can only live on sea food. However, there is a theory that the differences between man and apes came about by the natural selection of some apes (our ancestors) living in aquatic environments (like mangroves) looking for fish and seafood. If this is correct, then all these people who insinuate that humans should give up sea food are in fact keeping us from the thing that made us who we are.
Why is this comment and other comments like it examples of Anti-Humanism? Well, it is an example of how some people are giving greater sympathy to some “dog of the sea” rather than others of their own species. For whilst some people say that Grey seals are threatened (which they are not) Human British Fishermen certainly are. Main threats, rich people from urban areas buying houses in fishing areas on mass, thus pushing up the local housing prices, making it difficult for younger fishermen and women to get started, thus forcing them either to commute to work, or simply find work in an area with some affordable housing (like North west Wales, which we all agreed was rough.) Incidentally, these same people who are inadvertently pushing British fishermen into “extinction” will probably be the same people who are defending these “dogs.”
Finally, to finish with, this whole charade which I have helped push forward is in many respects trivial to the much more serious problem of depleting fish stocks. If all the fish in the sea where to disappear, fishermen would immediately go “extinct”, as would all the associated industries, there would be massive ecological damage (and I mean massive), this would include a mass “invasion” of sea gulls and other sea birds, looking for food inland such as rubbish, which in turn would threaten the safety of many human beings living in high litter areas and it would deprive us of much needed food. However, this problem can be solved with the following steps.
1. Rotation, this would mean only fishing in a certain stretch of ocean for a period of time, then at a certain point move on to another stretch of ocean, do this in a “circle” until after awhile you return to the same place, which has now become full of fish again.
2. No fish zones, this may sound strange, but as the population of sea life begins to rocket within these zones, the fish will eventually have to move out of these zones, where they can be rounded up by the fishermen.
3. Rotation of stock, rather than simply the supermarkets buying fish to meet demand, they sell the fish in proportion to how much of a certain species is in the sea, heh, most fish seems the same to me (although there is a distinct white and red meat as there is with life on land).
4. Efficiency, rather than simply going out to fish for a certain species or genus etc. Then throwing out the rest, try and sell everything that is hauled up.
5. Efficiency for us consumers, buy any random type of fish and eat it all up, that’s everyone (this is to support number 4.)
6. Fish farms, this should take a lot of strain of the natural oceans, making it easier for them to recover from a fishing bout whilst not making much of a change to the output of fish.
Well, here are my ideas, but I’m sure the fishermen will have a better idea any way. :)