Moments of Permanence - Some people are terrible at arguing

From: willow Date: June 9th, 2014 02:00 am (UTC) (Link)

Hmm, originally (during the years) I didn't understand 'catch and release' as something more than; "Oh this one is way too young'. And then I realized that people thought the chance to catch the fish and take the picture was more worth it than to kill and cook the fish.

And that seemed weird to me. But just weird. One of those things I wouldn't understand, perhaps due to culture - I grew up in a fishing culture.

Until you mentioned it as animal cruelty though? I don't think I consciously thought about; hooked in the mouth, set free bleeding, after a time of no air. Like I knew all the parts, and some of them I thought gross, but it was so in my mind as; cultural thing I would never get. That I didn't think of it any other way.

PS: Re zoos? For years too I thought, once they'd gotten past 'animals in cages for gawking' that zoos had come to a place of; animal rehabilitation and animal who wouldn't survive in the wild due to reasons (injury, disease, something). Then I realized within the past... 5 yrs maybe? That nope, zoos are keeping non-injured elephants simply cause 'zoos have always had elephants', etc...etc...

So argh.

And then I realized that the people promoting nature/animal preserves? Are shoving out indigenous peoples living on the land as if THEY having been cohabitating with the fauna there for ages past. And worse, whereas the Indigenous People's WALK and mind their business. These preserves want to drive through with a 100% guarantee of seeing an animal.

And I'm just...0.o.

Cause it's just a transplant of invasion and interference.

Edited 2014-06-09 02:04 am (UTC)

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From: sami Date: June 9th, 2014 03:31 am (UTC) (Link)

Well, the Highland Wildlife Park is in Scotland, and the Scots are about as indigenous as people get around there and they run it, but I know what you mean.

I think it depends on the zoo. I know Perth Zoo is involved in breeding programs for just about every animal they have. (Elephants included; their primary elephant is Asian. She goes on walks through the whole Zoo every day - the whole route is plastered with signs warning people not to go to close to her or try and touch her or anything. I'm not sure how many other elephants they have at the moment. Last time I was there they had several males, but they were her sons and were getting pretty big, so they may have been traded to other zoos by now - genetic diversity and all that.)

They get very excited about births, although on a number of occasions the announcement in the newsletter amounts to: "BABIES! ... you'll probably be able to see them in a few months, because their mother isn't feeling very social right now. But BABIES!" Although they made another super-big deal about it when the Painted Dog puppies got old enough to leave the den, because, you know, puppies, all running around the habitat being cute.

Curiously enough, one of the displays at Perth Zoo is also the old bear cages. It's odd to see an exhibit on the topic of how zoos can be a living manifestation of animal cruelty in a zoo. (Last time I was there the only bear they had was the Sun Bear, which was quite hard actually to get to see, because that particular Sun Bear, at least, was only very, very occasionally in the mood to go to the part of his enclosure where people could see him.)

Perth Zoo, though, is exceptional in part because it's Perth, and one thing Perth has is land. Perth Zoo is huge, and so there's room for each animal's habitat also to be very roomy - if a little odd, sometimes. Like the wombats are split into two enclosures, because apparently males and females tend to fight if it's not mating season, so they've got a split enclosure with a gate that gets opened for mating season only.

Two of the tortoises also seem to hate each other, but tortoise fights are kind of hilarious - they just keep bumping into each other, trying to tip each other over and failing, because they're the same size and apparently the same skill. While the third tortoise just chews on some greenery and looks at the others like they're morons.

I kind of love Perth Zoo, I admit. It's great for taking visitors to, too, because the Australian wildlife section has a walk-through area with kangaroos in it, so the tourists can get a nice close look at kangaroos that are used to people and not terrified. (If you're patient, you can pet them a little. Visitors have to stay on the path, but kangaroos are allowed to come over to the path if they feel like it, and sometimes they do, if you don't act too eager.)

But Perth Zoo doesn't guarantee seeing all the animals. You will definitely see some, and certain animals you are just about guaranteed to see at least one of them, even if it's only because there's about twelve of them there. (I have never yet seen a numbat, however, even though I go to the enclosure every single time.)

As for fishing... yeah, it's kind of a bugbear of mine. Fishing to feed yourself or your family or your village is fine with me, but I'm not really a fan of commercial fishing, not least because fish populations have been seriously down for the last few centuries, and I am strongly morally opposed to pretty much any recreational fish that doesn't include eating the catch.

Catch-and-release is, yes, torture. Wounding the fish, dragging it via hooks in its flesh to a lethally hostile environment, and then throwing it back still wounded, so it can also bleed and attract predators? Indefensible, to me. And hunting "game fish" that you don't even eat... that's just recreational murder.

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From: willow Date: June 9th, 2014 03:43 am (UTC) (Link)

I grew up with 'commercial fishing' and yet it wasn't industrialized like in the US and similar. Cause small island, three major ports for use with fishing boats/with attached fish market (fresh fish on ice - early morning catch or late afternoon available in early evening catch).

Undoubtedly some boats supplied supermarkets. But when I was young? There were only two major supermarkets in the whole damn country. And I lived near the 'new one'.

So yeah, if not a 'village' level, a 'village conclave' level.

Teeny island nation. Could walk across with width of it in a single morning. Just a couple hours.

There was tourist fishing, on boats outfitted for that. But if I remember correctly, the whole deal was the pay for either the chance to fish plus the cooking of it, or a tie in for your hotel chef to cook it in a kind of room-service for the very hoity.

And given the ports, if that was 20 charters per three-day, that was a lot. And they'd catch mostly flying fish, nothing big. Maybe what most USians know as Mahimahi aka dolphin.

But that's still a very different demand and supply set up.

It took me years of living in the US, btw, to realize how much I was used to fish as a more regular part of my diet - that isn't possible here (not since the late 80's) due to mercury levels. When my family was in Florida it was a real big deal, cause we didn't eat a lot of beef and it was everywhere whereas fish wasn't the goto food, and there was no lamb, mutton or goat. Which just left chicken.

Semi random ramble within a ramble; one of the reasons I enjoy a particular author's universe is cause it has resource watching like that built into the culture of the non-humans.

And now I'm making myself hungry thinking of butterfish and shark. Hmmmm. Shark.

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From: sami Date: June 11th, 2014 01:39 am (UTC) (Link)

Shark is very tasty, it's true. For some reason I remember it being much easier to get here when I was a kid, but that could just be because I don't go to fish-oriented eateries very much any more.

Goat is pretty unusual, but it must be available because I know a restaurant that serves it and also we had it once at some Italian friends' home. But lamb and mutton are always around in Australia.

I read a fantasy book series that kept making me twitch because one of the things all the characters accepted as true by default was that mutton is awful and you only eat it if you have no other choices, and I always wanted to yell at them because mutton is delicious if you cook it right. If you want simple you can just throw everything in one pot and mutton stew is still *fantastic*.

Small island-grade commercial fishing is almost certainly never going to be a serious problem, if only because of the amount of water around for the fish to live in relative to the human population density, but commercial fishing as practiced in Europe (of course) for the last five or six centuries (at least) is seriously problematic.

These days they're taking a little bit more care to try and maintain the population levels of the fish, but the levels they're maintaining are still a tiny, tiny fraction of what they were a thousand years ago. And it really really matters. If nothing else, the ocean's ability to absorb carbon is *kind of important*, since it's the only reason the entire ecosystem hasn't already melted. Boil it down and: if we had more fish, they'd be pooping more and also dying more, and there'd be more oceanic flora absorbing carbon and also more fish skeletons and carapaces and things which offsets the acidification via chemistry.

If I ruled the world, fishing would... well, probably I'd start with just banning all trawlers and drift-nets and so on. You can fish with hooks and nets small enough to be operated by human beings, but only if you are fishing for food, and whaling is capped at "no, no you can't", and in a few decades we'll set new fish population levels to maintain.

There'd be exceptions, of course. For example, I know that Norway has a set policy of outright encouraging people to fish a certain kind of crab off their coast to extinction, because it's an invasive species that the Soviet Union introduced off the Russian coast that's spreading and Norway would really like it to not spread further, thanks, and I think it's actually quite ingenious to go, hey, this crab is delicious and also quite fun and adventure-y to catch, so let's try and eat them all to death. That would still be fine.

But on the other hand Norway wouldn't be allowed to hunt whales any more.

If I ruled the world, the only people who would be allowed to hunt whales would be the people who still do it in kayaks, because apart from anything else, I consider whale vs kayak to be a reasonably fair fight, and not an overall risk to whale populations.

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From: willow Date: June 11th, 2014 01:46 am (UTC) (Link)

And then there's the fact that for the most part, people who eat whale and or say seal etc as part of a traditional diet - managed to do so for centuries without the 'take everything' approach. So even if they modernized their equipment for the safety of the fisherpersons, their fishing mentality would be different.

It's not affected by say; The trick to make profit/give the midwest ocean spam (lobster) as exotic, so now it's a whole industry with dangerous population depletion specs, and lack of species variation, etc...

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