Stop eating fish!

faroe-islands-whale2 — The Faroe Islands

I saw a documentary the other day called ‘The Cove’. It was a pretty awesome documentary about a secret bay where a load of Japanese slaughter thousands of dolphins for no real valid reason. At the start of the documentary, before you see the slaughter, the activists involved are a bit baffled as to why. Dolphin meat has toxic levels of mercury and don’t make good eating. They then discovered that the fisherman were passing off some dolphin meat as whale meat and people were unwittingly poisoning themselves. My first thought was that it sucks for the dolphins but at least they aren’t endangered like whales – if people ate what they thought was whale but were in fact ingesting toxic dolphin meat, then at least some good is coming out of all this. Lots of dead whale munchers. Then it turns out that kids were being fed this meat too and that’s just wrong. They should at least have the chance to grow up and make their own choices.

As you can see from the photo here though, the Japanese are not alone. Norweigans, Icelanders, and the Faroe Islanders kills whales.They justify it because these long finned pilot whales are on the slight increase and so therefore it’s ok to hack at them with choppers.

One of the reasons given by the Japanese in the documentary for killing whales and dolphins are that the animals in questions eat too much fish and

_42269000_seafd_global_loss203gr — No more fish

stocks of fish are depleting. This is ridiculous. Numerous studies have shown that fish stocks are depleting because, and this seems fairly obvious, we are all eating too much fish. When you hunt a marine species to the point that less than 10% of its population survives, that species goes into collapse. It has been proven that if diversity drops, then so do fish yields. In about 40 years we may just run out. According to UN studies fish exports rose 55% from 2000 to 2006. Six of the top ten exporters were Western countries (http://www.fao.org/newsroom/common/ecg/1000850/en/fishtradefacts08b.pdf). Killing dolphins and whales won’t help fish recover, not eating them will.

Another argument put forward by all whaling countries, is that it is a way of life. Well, tough shit. Do something else. Unless you’re an idiot you can retrain. Plenty of jobs have gone – chimney sweeps, hansom cab drivers, coal miners, dodo handlers, British Airways staff (soon). Welcome to the modern world. Become a web designer or something. Thanks to the EU nearly all British fisherman have had to do this.

I’ve had friends that claim to be vegetarians but then it turns out they eat fish. It’s weird being lectured by someone with a plate of 30 dead whitebait in front of them that my eating a slice of cow is wrong. Also when people say they eat fish, they actually mean fish, crustaceans, molluscs, arthropods and so on. Basically they seem to hate eating anything that made the evolutionary crawl out of the sea. It’s ok for one person to eat 50 mussels but not 50 people to eat one cow. At least now you can point out that they are causing the death of huge amounts of species and the imminent collapse of marine ecologies, while you are eating an easily sustainable food-source or ‘sausage’. (Apologies to these friends as you no longer do this.)

So what should you eat? Obviously something has to die as we live on organic matter. You can eat vegetables and fruit. Woohoo!

I personally think it’s ok to eat cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, insects and swans. The first four can be humanely farmed and can happily trot round fields before you fire a bolt into their brains. Insects are in no danger of dying out and are pretty much the same as prawns. Bit weird though I’ll admit but huge amounts of the planet eat them. I ate a fried grasshopper in Thailand once and it was actually quite tasty although when I woke up with a hangover and found a leg stuck in my tooth, I almost threw up. Swans are ok to eat because they are pure evil. I hate swans.

Basically you should eat your greens and if you choose to eat meat, eat one that is easily sustainable. Preferably one that would die out pretty quickly if we stopped looked after them, like with cows. I do think that the animals should be organic and free range though. Battery farming is cruel. This will also mean that meat will be more expensive, taste better, and will become more of treat. People shouldn’t expect a chicken for a fiver or meat with every meal.