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Why do you think they do not apply?
Some reasons why I think they apply:
I eat fish so I am not playing the guilt game, they're just the ethical considerations I can think of.
I disagree. The two main arguments against eating land animals are 1) cruelty and deprivation of life and 2) effect on the planet.
Both of these apply. Commercial fishing uses inhumane killing methods and fish are actually quite intelligent.
Overfishing is completely destroying the ocean ecosystems and will even have a knock-on effect on land ecosystems eg salmon in rivers normally transfer masses of nutrients to land and trees via bears etc.
The idea that fish do not experience pain is also ludicrous... They possess a central nervous system and can very much feel pain.
I'm also opposed to catch & release fishing for fun/sport for this reason.
Imagine a hyper-advanced species suddenly and painfully yanked you up into different atmospheric conditions where you're desperately unable to breathe.
Is it perfectly acceptable just because they put you back down in your natural environment before you died, with a new painful wound and traumatic experience?
I certainly don't think so...
Their bodies are also formed to exist supported by the water. When taken out their very bodies are crushing their organs. It's grim.
In a global ecological sense, it is worse to eat fish than pork, we are sucking the seas dry, we have known it for decades, and invented new methods to do it more efficiently.
With land animals you can see the conditions and the effect of over production, with fish you don't, and we keep at it.
Grown fish is less bad, but still contribute to pollution of the seas.
Trawling should be banned globally for a minimum of 50 years.
We have also invented ways to do it more sustainably, and even have handy wallet sized Sustainable Seafood Lists for each region of the US to make sure you make sustainable choices when eating at restaurants or purchasing at the market
Seafood Watch Guides
@Alue42 we used to have these in New Zealand. It was a card you could keep in your wallet, listed all the common eating fish from best to worst, with sustainable ones coded green at the top and endangered ones in red.
But it was depressing over the years with each new edition to slowly see all those green fish turning orange and then red as each species became depleted.
Depends on the perspective being considered:
Are fish sentient? Yes.
Are they very sentient, with lots of free-will? No.
Does our current industry's completely-gutting the marine food-chain have global consequences? Yes.
How are we doing with respect to keeping that food-chain alive? Terrible: any species that becomes our industrial prey, gets reduced to 10% of its normal population within 1 decade.
Cod used to live to be about 80y old, ttbomk, now they live to be 8, or less.
The smashing of the coral-forests they breed in, at the bottom of the ocean, with dragger-nets ( falsely called "rock hoppers" ), means the cod-fishery collapsed & stayed collapsed, and all fisheries are "managed" like that, by lobbying to protect industrial-ignorance.
Accountability won't ever happen, because industry/money won't tolerate that.
There's a ScientificallyTestablePrediction in the Christian bible, in Rev, that both terrestrial & marine food-chains collapse ( at the time of the "3rd Seal" ).
That is going to happen this century, no matter what political/religious rabies goes rampaging where.
All the political & religious & food-insecurity & ClimatePunctuation wars that we must enact in order to "manage" our unconscious-minds' stress/fear/panic, and all of the nihilist malicious-actors ( China cyaniding other country's seas, because those other countries are not breaking & obeying China, in recent news )..
Morality is contextual.
Personal-context can say 1 thing, or another, global context can be quite different.
Buddha said that eating the flesh of another's life was faulty because they never consented to be butchered/consumed, and that is true.
I can't remember what other reasons were given, that one stuck on me.
I don't eat any meat, or that aweful "Beyond Meat" or "Impossible Meat" stuff, because I can't then reach the meditations I'm using to rip my continuum out from this world's ideology-driven death-spasms, and remaining in this world, now, is indulging in being ground-to-hamburger, in my eyes.
I want out.
Eating meat of any kind blocks me from progressing on that through the meditations, exactly as the ancient rishis of India said.
That tested to be true.
You have to live with yourself, not with my conscience.
You decide on your own morality: you have to live with it.
I've never bothered learning the "precepts" or any of the other stuff of AwakeSoulism/Buddhism: I care about results, not about dogma.
What tests to be true, that is worth relying-on, for me.
_ /\ _
It is ethical to eat fish and meat.
Very well thought out.
They are certainly a lot of issues with eating fish. Maybe not the same as factory farmed land animals. More along the lines of extinction of species and the destruction of ecosystems. It's worth looking into if it's something you are concerned with. There's also indirect cruelty to more intelligent species like dolphins.
If fish could eat you do you believe they would think it's unethical?
If you answer it's yes then don't eat fish.
I mean undesirable and unethical are not the same thing. I wouldn't really even place an ethical question on a fish, unless maybe they live in an aquarium and know better or something (like eating their handler, assuming living conditions are good). Not even moral questions really, though a hungry fish is probably acting pretty morally to meet its base needs TBH.
That said, if there was a neck-snapper-fish I'm pretty sure people would seek it out. And they'd say stuff like live by the fish, die by the fish.
I see two concerns, humanitarian and ecological. The ecological concern is only a problem with overconsumption. The humanitarian concern I don't think applies to fish since they are dumb.
What about bycatch? That's a factor in both. Also ecological: the fact that most of the plastic waste in the sea (and on earth in general) is from fishing. Also, not all seafood is dumb. Octopus is one of the smartest things out there and we eat that. Lobsters have been shown to feel pain and we boil them alive.
Was that particular fish a dick?
Spiny dogfish. Those spiny, bait-stealing little jerks.
All I can say is I truly embrace the fact that I'm a human and an omnivore. I don't deny there are ethical horrors with the way animals are raised for slaughter, it's quite disgusting in fact. But I ALSO can't deny that I love eating meat off the bone - chicken wings, spare ribs, steak, you name it. When I'm eating meat I'm very happy indeed. And I don't try to pretend I can justify it as somehow OK with regard to how the animals are slaughtered.
I'm a walking contradiction in many regards. I don't try to reconcile my love of meat with my love of animals. I have both, and they sometimes are in conflict. I eat all kinds of things, veggies and grains and all kinds of stuff, but my primary love is meat. I don't deny it, and I don't justify it. It is what it is, and so am I.
Cries in Gen X.
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. -- G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain (The New World )
Farmed fish is probably not too bad by comparison but.. wild caught fish hell no. We’re speed running fucking up the ocean ecosystem and ruining the aquatic biosphere. It always alarms me when I see a change to the species of fish used in “generic budget oven-cook battered fish fillets”. It doesn’t even seem possible to make wild catch fishing sustainable, unlike every other form of animal husbandry where you could argue it’s more of a technical challenge.
Hmm now I realise I’m a hypocrite. Think I’ll stop eating fish
Farmed fish is often worse. The fish are kept in small pens and given tons of antibiotics, polluting the local water. Sometimes those non-native fish escape the pens and interbreed with native species. They are also less nutritious than wild fish, at least when it comes to salmon.
Well, fuck.