![]() The chicken has a right to live a complete chicken life, and we also have some right to live a complete life as an omnivorous primate with the sharp teeth and stereoscopic vision of a predator. ![]() While we humans may "know better" and choose to not do that, we are also quite closely related to wolves. It is obviously not morally wrong for a wolf to eat a chicken. And, if you spend time with farmers, you understand what it means to both care for and kill the same animal, to give it both a good life and a good death. Out in nature, you experience a greater range of ways that animals physically interact. In an urban environment, the only killing you are likely to experience is violent acts in movies and violent attacks between humans. Eacn animal has a complex role in our society that has aspects of being material property, a natural resource, and a living thinking being. The former respect that we have many things in common with animals, but also many differences. The latter tend to have a simplified view that animals are sort like dumb, well-meaning people in animal costumes. If you spend time around hunters or farmers, they have much more complex relationship with animals than most urban dwellers do. (Heck, killing humans was also considered much more acceptable in certain situations.) The animal does not want to die any more than you or I would, and thus making it die is deeply wrong.īut for much of human history, killing animals was considered a fundamentally different act from killing a human. That mindset does not leave much room to interpret killing as anything but hateful and evil. By implication, doing so for practical reasons (like food) to thus be even worse: a kind of craven, mercenary murder-for-hire which is deeply immoral. In liberal society today many equate killing an animal to violent murder. I think it's important to keep in mind that attitudes around death and killing vary widely. Fishing is a good way to reconnect with nature and with your own nature as an animal, a predator that eats other animals. It's up to you to decide if you think that people should or shouldn't do it, but, either way, I think it is a real learning experience to understand what that choice entails.Īlso, I think we tend to live lives increasingly removed from the physical, tactile, natural world. It's important to have a real tactile understanding of what it means to take an animal from the wild and turn it into food. ![]() I don't know if it improves the taste, but it seems kinder to me than letting it beat itself senseless in a pile of ice or flail around in the water with a line running through its throat.įor anyone who thinks this comment is brutal or unpleasant, I would really recommend spending some time fishing or hunting if you eat meat. The gills flare and the fish stiffens for a second and then immediately after it has clearly shuffled off its mortal coil. It took a few tries to find the right spot, but once I did, I do think it was more humane. I used a little pocket knife and poked it between the eyes. The last time I went fishing, I tried the first step of ike jime where you spike the brain. When I was a kid, I once saw someone cut the fillets off a fish and toss the "carcass" back in the water where it proceeded to try to swim away. If you watch videos of people cleaning fish, you'll see they are often still moving even while the fish is being filleted. They were still moving when I went to clean them later. I tried putting them in a cooler on ice the first time and they flopped around for hours. People typically throw them in a cooler of ice while still alive, or put them on a stringer, a line run through their mouth and out the gill so that can sort of still somewhat swim around and live until the fisherman is ready to go home.īoth of those seem pretty unpleasant to me. I fish on occasion, though at my skill level it's probably better described as "being disappointed next to water".
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