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Hanoi fruit ladies

slightly furious reminder that fish do in fact feel pain and do in fact experience fear and distress when in pain since people seem to love spreading the myth that fish don't feel pain. what is it with people assuming a creature is incapable of feeling pain or emotion just because it doesn't have complex facial muscles. come on gang

crabussy

it's everywhere too. I see a video titled "funny fish compilation" and it's just fish being blatantly mistreated and harmed. e.g. being patted like a dog while gasping for breath out of the water. or someone shoving a cigarette into a fish's mouth before dropping it back in the water. any videos like that featuring dogs or rabbits or birds would be met with absolute horror but because it's fish, it gets 500k likes. it just sucks

beingharsh

Lest we forget that most people don't care about animal cruelty even if it is terrestrial animals. Animals classified as pets and human companions are the only ones who are deemed to be above harm, but even those categories are fluctuating, along with the categorization of animals as food and non-food. Just look at how westerners react to some people eating dog flesh or horse flesh vs. their habitual consumption of cow, pig, and chicken flesh. And of course, deeming an animal to have no sentience or capacity for suffering is another convenient trick to imagine yourself as causing no harm.

Or as Brock Bastian and Steve Loughnan put it:

At the heart of the tension between meat-eating and concern for animal welfare is the experience of conflict between two dissonant attitudes. To state this formally, my belief that animals are morally relevant creatures that deserve to be protected from harm (including death) is inconsistent with my desire to eat their meat. The belief that animals should not be harmed, on its own, would predict a decision not to eat meat, yet when paired with a range of beliefs about meat-eating—that it is enjoyable, nutritional, or socially valuable—animal welfare concerns may have little influence on behavior. Nonetheless, in the context of meat-eating, animal welfare concerns create negative affect, threatening peoples’ enjoyment... It is a morally significant conflict—one that may threaten self-perception (cf. Barkan, Ayal, & Ariely, 2015; Bem, 1967; Stone & Cooper, 2001). Bringing harm to others is inconsistent with a view of oneself as a moral person (Aquino & Reed, 2002; Reed & Aquino, 2003). As such, meat consumption leads to negative affect for meat-eaters because they are confronted with a view of themselves that is unfavorable: “How can I be a good person and also eat meat?” We argue that dissonance arises when people fail to resolve this perception, and therefore feel that their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are at odds (see Festinger, 1957; Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; for an account of ethical dissonance, see Barkan, Ayal, Gino, & Ariely, 2012). It is the associated negative affective state that motivates attempts to resolve dissonance.