On the Personalities of Ocean Dwellers and Human Intervention
Eric Marcus, a stellar animal rights activist, just shared an article he found in the Vancouver Sun: “Nothing Fishy about Personality Traits in Animals, Study Finds.” Scientists at the University of Guelph find that even “ordinary” Canadian brook trout demonstrate distinct personalities.
The idea of personalities is starting to spread across our views of the whole animal kingdom, says Rob McLaughlin, the Guelph biologist who ran the study. This seems obvious in the case of dogs or chimpanzees, but less obvious among fish.
Eric Marcus responds:
Of course it’s obvious, mainly because we have more experience with them, but there’s also the consideration that some animals seem more neurologically advanced than others. But people need to stop assuming that non-humans and humans do not share certain basic, evolutionarily-developed traits like pain, fear, affection (love) and even personality. The pressures applied to our respective species, and our ability to adapt to them as individuals, result in different outcomes for each of us. Look at the difference between feral cats and house cats for one patently obvious example of how one’s environment shapes personality in animals.
The more rational course, in my opinion, would be to work from an assumption that all animals are unique beings with fundamental interests and leave them alone, rather than exploiting them to find out where we are right or wrong. Because, when we’re right–when we do research on an animal and find that they do, in fact, experience pain and have personalities–it’s at the expense of another being that we now know didn’t deserve to be treated like an object.
My mother’s side of the family is from Newfoundland, Canada on the East coast. As such, I spent many treasured summers in my childhood in Newfoundland picking blueberries by the bucketful and spending lots of time on boats on the Atlantic ocean looking down into the mysterious world where sea urchins opened and closed their spiny maws, and beautiful fish flitted in their paths across rocks. While we ate fish quite often, I still developed a strong connection to the life in those ocean waters - through their beauty, through their strange lives under the waves that I could only see in bits and pieces.
Later, as a child I also went to Marineland. I was chosen out of a large crowd of many to be the one volunteer to come up on stage and interact with the killer whale. I felt so lucky and privileged to be chosen - and had that experience of touching and connecting to that creature with its shining black skin. When I became a vegan, I learned the truth about all of the things that seemed so benign before - the way whales are really treated in places like Marineland, how institutions like those exist to use animals purely for our entertainment and often incorporate little truly educational materials (do you remember learning anything at Marine Land?). I also learned about by-catch. Oh, the terrors of by-catch… Colleen Patrick-Goudreau of the Vegetarian Food for Thought Podcast had an episode explicitly detailing the consequences of fish consumption and by-catch:
We often hear the quote: “10 billion animals are killed for human consumption every year in the United States. Worldwide, I believe it’s 45 billion,” but it’s more accurate to say that “10 billion LAND animals are killed for human consumption every year in the U.S. Otherwise, we’re just disregarding the billions of aquatic animals killed for the same purpose – human appetites. Although the number of aquatic animals killed for consumption in the United States goes unreported, annual estimates are more than 17 billion in the U.S. alone, and sport fishing and angling kills another 245 million animals annually. So, basically, we’re talking about over 27 billion animals – both land and aquatic – being killed every year in the U.S. so we humans can eat them. We’re not talking about survival – we’re talking about appetite. And these numbers don’t count the millions of aquatic animals killed as incidental catch.
By-catch refers to unintended or unwanted animals caught by the fishing industry. It is estimated that by-catch-related mortality is causing population declines in 13 out of the 44 species of marine mammals that are suffering high death rates from human activities. Commercial fishers use a number of techniques for ensnaring animals, from setting miles of line and baited hooks (called longlines) to catch animals such as sharks, swordfish, and tuna; to using large nets to catch schools of fish. These large nets are towed underwater by what are called trawlers. A trawler is a fishing vessel designed for the purpose of operating a trawl, a type of fishing net that is dragged along the bottom of the sea (or sometimes just above the bottom at a specified depth).
A single pass of a trawl removes up to 20% of the seafloor fauna and flora. And the fisheries with the highest levels of by-catch are shrimp fisheries: 80%-90% of a catch may consist of marine species other than the shrimp being targeted. I just wanna make sure you heard that: 80%-90% of the animals caught in these nets that are targeting shrimp and prawns are actually non-target animals – they’re by-catch.
… The other thing to consider is that the dredging along the ocean floor also breaks up coral and the habitats of bottom-dwellers. And because the same areas are dredged again and again, it’s not like these habitats and inhabitants have time to recover before being destroyed again. So, if you consider yourself an “environmentalist,” and most people do - it’s something to consider. Fish populations, communities, and ecosystems are being destroyed so we can have shrimp cocktail – and I used to eat that. I used to eat shrimp cocktail.
Now - by-catch is often discarded back into the ocean already dead or dying. Many are half-alive and die slow, unnecessary deaths. Trawl nets in general, and shrimp trawls in particular where the discard may be 90% of the catch, have been identified as sources of mortality for many species of concern, including endangered animals and cetaceans, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises. Sea turtles, already endangered, have been killed by the thousands in shrimp trawl nets.
… According to a 2003 BBC story by Alex Kirby called “Nets Kill 800 Cetaceans a Day,” more than 800 dolphins, porpoises, and whales die every day as they get tangled in fishing nets – that’s 300,000 every year.
One of the many questions I get asked my people unfamiliar with veganism, is “do you eat fish?” And for me the answer is an impassioned “no,” because of all of the animals I have stopped eating unnecessarily, for me fish are creatures especially important to me. I remember when my sister as a pre-teen had a pet fish. One day, it got sick and slowly died - we sat with it as it fell in the tank - I remember the sinking feeling in my own chest as we helplessly watched it. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. Even that supposedly ‘insignificant’ life - watching it fall away was terrible. He or she was a sentient being, just like a whale, or like our companion animals - dogs or cats. Having a unique personality, being able to experience feelings.
While many of us can easily express admiration for the larger ocean mammals such as whales and dolphins, it’s important to remember that just as in the case of land mammals - all animal species in their diversity are interconnected. When one is endangered, it throws off the entire balance and puts other animals in danger. They all. in my opinion, have the right to exist unharmed by us. When I think of the alarming information about whales, how it is now so loud for them below the water that it’s the equivalent to a construction site for humans (we would have to wear headphones to protect our ears) or louder, and that the interference of this noise pollution is interfering with their ability to find a mate and communicate with each other (among other consequences), it makes me imagine a time long ago when whales swam through the vast, untouched expanse of the deep with its silence - a time when we weren’t there or had no ability to get close to them or interfere, when they lived according to their own whims and were truly free.
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