what is ethically wrong wit sea food?

Question

i was a vegan for a long time and then i was thinking bout it and i dont think shrimp fish or scallops etc have feeling, i've had loiads of pet fish and never seen any emotion and the only thing i see out there is for health reasons? is this as evil as eating mammals with feelings?

Answer 1

Fish farming, or “aquaculture,” has become a billion-dollar industry, and more than 30 percent of all the sea animals consumed each year are now raised on these “farms.” The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the aquaculture industry is growing three times faster than land-based animal agriculture, and fish farms will surely become even more prevalent as our natural fisheries become exhausted.

Aquafarms can be based on land or in the ocean. Land-based farms raise thousands of fish in ponds, pools, or concrete tanks. Ocean-based aquafarms are situated close to shorelines, and fish in these farms are packed into net or mesh cages. All fish farms are rife with pollution, disease, and suffering, regardless of their location.
Aquafarms squander resources—it can take 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce just 1 pound of farmed fish—and pollute the environment with tons of fish feces, antibiotic-laden fish feed, and diseased fish carcasses.

Fish on aquafarms spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy enclosures, and many suffer from parasitic infections, diseases, and debilitating injuries. Conditions on some farms are so horrendous that 40 percent of the fish may die before farmers can kill and package them for food. In short, fish farms bring suffering and ecological devastation everywhere they go.
Aquafarms squander resources—it can take 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce just 1 pound of farmed fish—and pollute the environment with tons of fish feces, antibiotic-laden fish feed, and diseased fish carcasses.

Fish on aquafarms spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy enclosures, and many suffer from parasitic infections, diseases, and debilitating injuries. Conditions on some farms are so horrendous that 40 percent of the fish may die before farmers can kill and package them for food. In short, fish farms bring suffering and ecological devastation everywhere they go.
Many land-based aquafarms are indoors, so farmers even control the amount of light that fish get.
These farmed fish will spend their entire lives crammed together, constantly bumping against each other and the sides of their grossly overcrowded cage.
Raising Farmed Fish
When they are only 4 to 7 inches long, young fish (called “fingerlings”) are transported from the hatchery where they were born to the fish farm. This is the first of many moves that they will make before their final trip to the slaughterhouse.

Fecal Stew (And That’s Not the Worst of It)
Contaminants from ocean-based aquafarms (fish excrement, uneaten chemical-laden food, and swarms of parasites) spread to the surrounding ocean, and the rampant disease inside the cages is passed on to ocean fish in the area, in some cases increasing the incidence of sea lice 1,000-fold.

“Grading” fish by size is a stressful and sometimes-deadly process. Each fish is graded as many as five times during his or her life, sucked up or netted and then spit back out into a different cage.
Unassuming on the surface, each of these aquafarm cages is stuffed with as many as 50,000 individuals who will never be able to swim without constantly bumping into other fish and the sides of the cage.

Sea lice are a regular occurrence on salmon farms. These parasites eat at the fish, causing their scales to fall off and creating large sores. In severely crowded conditions, lice often eat down to the bone on fish’s faces. This is so common that fish farmers have taken to calling it the “death crown.”

Injuries and Death From Fighting and Rough Treatment
In intensely crowded fish farms, small fish are bullied and killed by larger fish, so fish are continually sorted to make sure that faster-growing individuals are moved to the appropriate size grouping. At each sorting, they are netted or pumped out of their tanks and dumped onto a series of bars and grates with varying space gaps to divide them by size and redistribute them into different netted cages or tanks; small fish slip through the small grates, while larger fish fall through the larger gaps. This practice, called “grading,” is very stressful and results in painful scrapes and loss of scales.

High-tech, high-volume systems control food, light (on indoor farms), and growth stimulation. Drugs, hormones, and genetic engineering are used to accelerate growth and change reproductive behaviors. High mortality rates, disease, and parasite infestations are common. Deformities and stress-related injuries are also a regular occurrence; on some farms, as many as 40 percent of the fish are blind—which is not addressed because it is not a problem for fish farmers.

Crowding
Since they are designed to navigate vast oceans and use all their senses to do so, many fish go insane from the cramped conditions and lack of space in fish farms. The tight enclosures inhibit their ability to navigate properly and cause them to knock against each other and the sides of the enclosure—this jostling causes sores and damage to their fins, as well.

Stocking densities (the number of fish per cubic foot of water) are not a function of fish welfare and are raised until the death losses outweigh the benefits of cramming more fish into a smaller space. Salmon farms are so overcrowded—with as many as 50,000 individuals in each enclosure—that a 2.5 foot fish spends his or her entire life in a space the size of a bathtub; trout farms are even more crowded, with as many as 27 full-grown fish in a bathtub-sized space.

Answer 2

Fish feel pain:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3673

Peter Singer in his book: The Ethics of What We Eat summises that scallops probably cannot be counted as being a sentient creature and would not feel pain.
If Peter Singer says this then I am happy to eat scallops.

Fish have feelings - read the above link.
Just because they might not display pain in a way which we can interpret does not mean they do not suffer when killed.

The other issue is to look at farmed seafood which places a huge toll on the environment as they deplete our small fish stocks from the ocean simply to feed the farmed ones.

Answer 3

Sea life does feel. They feel just like you and I. Any scuba diver will tell you lobsters and even their tiny cousins the shrimp are very curious creatures and will spend time touching divers trying to get to know them.

Add to that - the millions of animals that are killed in nets that just get tossed over board.

Entire sea floors destroyed as nets scoop up anything and everything for a pound of shrip.

I've had pet fish. They knew me and would happily school after me as I went from one side of their tank to the other.

Answer 4

I don't eat birds or mammals because the smell is disgusting to me. It smells like a dog kennel when I smell it up close.

I do eat all seafood. I think it's ridiculous that so many self righteous(sp?) vegans are so worried about the pain a lobster or clam feels but also are very pro choice. Seems as redundant as the pro lifers who eat meat and believe in the death penalty...

Answer 5

Grilled Cheese.

Answer 6

Fish are animals. what right have you to take a life, regardless of its feelings ?

If someone is in a vegatative state after an accident, does that make it ok to eat them ?

James B makes a good point ( NOT ) : anyone who does not share your belief is ridiculous...what a strange mindset you have, could almost be described as "self righteous" wouldn't you say ?

Answer 7

as a rule of thumb, If is does not have a face, you can eat it.

lesser animals like crustaceus and mollusks do dot have a brain, therefore they are no different than plants in what regards suffering.

Moreover, virtually no sea creature lives into old-age, they are all predated. If you fancy, eat only predator species, then you can think of yoursel as doing justice.

Answer 8

Have you ever seen a "trash" fish thrown over the shoulder of a fisherman only to writhe and gasp while baking in the sun. Tell me, that this is not feeling pain.

Answer 9

Whether you believe in God or not, all humanity understands that a living creature is exactly that- a living creature. A shrimp, a lobster and a scallop may not go to the cinema, enjoy a cuddle or hold up a paw for food, but it's still alive and doing it's own thing as God/evolution intended it to do.

It's our lack of understanding that causes a rift between us and nature. We expect creatures to be like us (hence our love of cats and dogs), that they should want to be with us, sit with us, behave etc. The smaller a creature is, the more insignificant it becomes to humans, because we can't identify with it the way we can with domestic animals, or cute animals like elephants and pandas.

Scallops don't have a face we can see, so we presume it can't suffer when it's being killed. People think that fish don't suffer because they don't cry out- yet we now know and have evidence to prove that fish suffer greatly*.

No healthy creature wants to be dead, wants to suffer. So why would we put them through it, presume that it'll be okay to do so?

Don't classify living creatures by their emotional/social abilities.

Sorry, for people mentioning health benefits: seafood is one of the biggest contributors to food poisoning. There are valuable nutrients in there (which can be found elsewhere), but the negatives outweight the positives. I wouldn't choose to eat deadly nightshade over spinach to get something like vitamin K, for example.

Also man wasn't 'designed' to eat meat. Hahaha! Designed? If you believe in evolution, you know we weren't 'designed'. If you believe in God, you have to ask yourself who you are to take life into your own hands by killing the animals and wildlife that we have around us.

Secondly, your 'canines' aren't real canines. Dogs are omnivore. Check out their teeth. Try taking a mouthful out of the side of a bull with your teeth. Even if you had the claws to hold the bull in place, you probably couldn't pierce the skin, you'd probably vomit, be sick, and be unable to digest what you ate...

Answer 10

first of all weather or not you see the emotion they have it, they prolly cant see it in you either and also your kinda a fake vegan if you have a pet fish

Answer 11

I don't mean this in a nasty way but, how do we know that veggies don't feel pain when they are pulled out of the earth, when they are cut from their roots?

I have no problem with vegetarians so long as they don't rationalize their choice with ethics and pain. I don't eat a lot of meat but I'm not trying to be a vegetarian. My teeth tell me I was designed to eat meat. I don't eat a lot of meat mostly because organic/humane meat is harder to find and more expensive.

Go ahead and eat fish. And forget the health thing. If you get your veggies from the local big-name grocery store, they're probably no better than the fish...