As I was sitting here enjoying a tuna fish sandwich with a side of shrimp cocktail, I was thinking about a thread I saw yesterday about how to euthanize a fish. Now I have been keeping fish since trillobites were the best clean-up crew, so I certainly don't want to see fish suffer, but I wonder how this tuna was euthanized or these shrimp.
Did they carefully put it in a small container, play soft music and dose it with clove oil? I really don't know. Those shrimp too. How did they meet their end?
Being of Italian descent, on Christmas, it is our custom to have at least 7 different kinds of seafood for dinner. Last Christmas we had over twenty. Does that make us bad? Of course, we never eat fish in view of my tank, as that would be like cannibalism, and my fish may get the horrors.
My family owned a seafood market, and on Fridays, my Dad would bring me down to the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan to buy the seafood for his store. It is amazing that those tons of fish that were unceremoniously dumped on the sidewalk were then moved around with snow shovels. Were they all euthanized? I wonder where they got the time.
And how much clove oil were they using?
In those days there were also huge sea turtles still alive on their backs. Now I know they were just pets as no one I know would hurt a beautiful sea turtle.
Every day I feed my fish live blackworms, clams and mysis. I am not sure if each one of those worms has feelings or thinks about it's family just before it gets eaten.
The millions of mysis also. Do they have more civil rights than the new born brine shrimp I feed my mandarins. Is there a brine shrimp rights group? How about the goldfish we sometimes feed to our moray eels? Do they have fewer rights than, say, a lionfish or tang? What if we fed tiny tangs to large goldfish? Would that be OK?
If we were to cycle a tank with a live fish or shrimp, we would get yelled at from everyone, but it seems to be perfectly fine to cycle a tank with a fish or shrimp that suffocated on the deck of a ship. I wonder about that. I also wonder about the leather belt I am wearing. How did they remove that strip of skin from that cow without him noticing?
Many people dip corals in insecticide before they put them in their tanks to kill "pests". I am sure those "pests" think of us as pests and, worse, murderers. If those "pests" were larger and cuter, we would keep them as pets and try to kill the corals they were living on.
Just one of the things I think about.
