Peter Singer, 73 years old, descendant of a Jewish family from Vienna, teaches bioethics at Princeton and is the thinker who laid the theoretical foundations of antispeciesism and addressed all the contemporary themes of ethics understood as practical ethics, i.e. ethics applied to our daily behaviors. Just the book, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter, released in 2016 with Princeton University Press, is a sort of summa of this second front of Singer's research, applied ethics.
The book consists of 82 short essays, 2/3 pages, which summarize his reflections on a very wide range of ethical issues of great relevance in the public debate. Our future lies in these reflections, there is how we will be and how we will behave. Reading it is equivalent to putting your gaze into the telescope and looking ahead.
One of the arguments to which Singer dedicates a substantial group of short essays it is the animal question, which he has dealt with throughout his career as a scholar of ethical issues and as a political activist. These are very measured essays. Essays that are more argumentative and discursive than aimed at combating opposing arguments in an assertive or declaratory way. Two of these are dedicated to fishing, one in particular on whaling is of particular relevance given the decision of the Japanese government to resume whaling.
Singer intervenes on a very delicate issue and also under the radar in the debate on the issue. He concerns the cultures that incorporate these activities into their identity. Then it becomes an ethical theme of the relationship between cultures if banning a certain identity trait of a culture, not shared by the others, could mean an offense to that culture and discrimination against a community that has practiced it for centuries and has deeply assimilated it into the national culture and collective imagination.
The resumption of whaling
Japan, after withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) last year, has resumed whaling effective July 1, 2019. The declared purpose of this decision is no longer of a scientific nature, as hitherto justified by the authorities, but purely commercial. The Japanese want to go back to eating whale meat and derivatives of the great cetacean.
However, consumption has significantly decreasedbut still remains quite popular particularly among the older generation. In the 200s, Japan consumed 5 tons of whale meat a year, while in recent years consumption has reached just XNUMX tons. A sensational drop also due to the scarce availability of the food.
By the end of the year, the five whalers that set sail from a port in the north of the country will be able to catch 227 whales operating within Japan's territorial waters and exclusive economic zone. It had been more than thirty years since Japan had hunted commercial whales, but now the intent of the Minister of Fisheries is to revive the whaling and processing industry and its consumption.
The following let's reproduce the two short essays by Singer on the issue of Japan and whaling and on that, more generally, of fishing.
Does the fight against whaling discriminate against other cultures?
The extinction of the whales is not at stake
Thirty years ago, Australian whaling ships, with government blessing, slaughtered sperm whales off the coast of Western Australia. Today, Australia leads the way in international protests against Japan's plan to kill 50 humpback whales. Japan, under international pressure, announced it would put the plan on hold for a year or two. The shift in public opinion about whaling has been dramatic, and not just in Australia.
It was Greenpeace that started protests against whaling in Australia. The government has called Sydney Frost, a retired judge, to head an inquiry into the whaling. Being Australian myself and also a professor of moral philosophy, I made the proposal.
I'm not saying whaling has to end because the whales are in danger. I know there are many good ecologists and marine biologists who have already put forward this thesis. Instead, I argue that whales are social mammals with developed minds; beings capable of enjoying life and feeling pain and not just physical pain, but most likely also anguish over the loss of someone in their group.
The ethical question on whales
Whales cannot be killed humanely: they are too big and, even with an explosive harpoon, it is difficult to hit the whale in the right spot. Furthermore, whalers do not want to use an adequate amount of explosives, because by damaging the body, it would jeopardize the precious oil and the coveted meat of the cetacean. So harpooned whales typically die slowly and painfully.
This raises a big ethical question about whaling. If there was an existential, life-or-death necessity for humans in killing whales, perhaps the ethical case against whaling could be moot. But there is no essential human need that requires the killing of whales. Anything you get from whales can be obtained cruelty-free from other sources. Causing innocent beings to suffer for no extremely serious reason is deeply wrong, and therefore whaling is unethical.
Frost agrees. He acknowledged that there can be no doubt that the methods used to kill the whales are inhumane, he called them "the most horrific". He also mentioned “the very real possibility that we are dealing with a creature that has a remarkably developed brain and a high degree of intelligence. He recommended stopping whaling and the Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, accepted the recommendation. Australia soon became an anti-whaling nation.
Japan's motivations
Despite the suspension of the plan to kill humpback whales, the Japanese whaling fleet will still kill about XNUMX individuals, mostly minke whales.
It justifies its hunt as "research" because a provision in the rules of the International Whaling Commission allows member countries to kill whales for research purposes. But the research appears to be a pretext for building a scientific case on commercial whaling, so if whaling is unethical, then the research itself is unethical.
Japan says it wants to carry on the whaling discussion calmly, based on scientific evidence, without "emotions". They think they have evidence to show that humpback whale numbers have increased enough to kill 50 without endangering the species. They may be right on this point. But no scientific research can tell us whether or not to kill whales. The "emotionality" is behind the Japanese desire to continue killing whales as well as Western environmentalists' opposition to this killing. Eating whales is not necessary for the health or nutrition of the Japanese. It's a tradition they wish to continue, presumably because some Japanese are emotionally attached to it.
A difficult subject to dismiss
However, the Japanese have an argument that is not so easy to dismiss. They argue that Western countries oppose whaling because to them, whales are a special kind of
animals, such as cows sacred to Hindus. Western nations should not, say the Japanese, try to impose their culture.
The best answer to this argument is that inflicting needless suffering on sentient beings is not a value that denotes a culture. It is, for example, one of the first precepts of one of Japan's main ethical traditions, Buddhism. But Western nations are in a weak position to give this kind of response, because they themselves inflict so much unnecessary suffering on animals. The Australian government, which has come out so strongly against whaling, allows the extermination of millions of kangaroos every year. The same can be said of the various forms of hunting in other countries, not to mention the massive amounts of animal suffering caused by ranching.
Whaling should stop because it brings unnecessary suffering to intelligent social animals capable of having a sentient life of their own. But against the Japanese charge of cultural bias, Western nations will be able to field few defenses until they do something much more about needless animal suffering in their own countries.
Fish substitutes: you're starting to see something
While meat substitutes are finding an important place in the diet of families, fish substitutes have an irrelevant weight. Thanks to two courageous startups, rewarded by investors and the stock market, the consumption of meat substitutes grew by triple digits in 2019 in the United States, the largest meat consumer in the world. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, in particular, are creating a market for meat substitutes approaching a billion dollars in value.
Their approach is innovative. The main target is not vegans and vegetarians, but meat consumers. The latter are responding well to a healthier, greener and more ethical product which, in terms of taste, is a good competitor to meat.
For fish we are little more than zero. The market for fish substitutes is worth just 10 million euros. Chris Kerr intends to remedy this gap, leading a small group of investors willing to invest in the challenge of new food and veganism.
In 2016 Kerr, through the financial vehicle New Crop, invested in a startup with the auspicious name of Good Catch. Good Catch aims to produce a tuna substitute with a mix of 15 different types of legumes. These days the cans of this product have been made available in American supermarkets, alongside the cans of tuna. Good Catch is talking to Tesco in the UK about setting up a similar operation.
Kerr's is not an isolated initiative. The "Financial Times" reports that in the United States there are at least 20 startups that are working on fish substitutes. Impossible Food itself considers them a priority. Kerr sees a huge space globally for plant-based fish substitutes. The global seafood market is estimated at $500 billion.
Chad Sarno, the CEO of Good Catch, said he tested the tuna vegetable in development with his cat. One day after fine-tuning some ingredients he had his “wow moment”. As soon as he opened the can the cat came running and ate it all. If the taste appeals to the cat's refined palate, why should it fail people?
Below we reproduce Peter Singer's contribution on fish pain.
Enjoy the reading!
If fish could scream their pain
The horrible penalty inflicted by fishing
When I was a child, my father took me for walks, often along a river or by the sea. We passed by people fishing, often hunched over their lines that had hooked a fish. I once saw a man take a small fish out of a bucket and thread it, still wriggling, onto a hook for bait.
Another time, when our path took us to the side of a quiet stream, I saw a man sitting and watching his line, seemingly at peace with the world, while beside him the fish, which he had already caught, stood writhing desperately and gasping in the air. My father told me that he could not understand how anyone could enjoy an afternoon fishing by a river surrounded by such horrible suffering.
These childhood memories came back to me when I read Worse Things Happen at Sea: The Welfare of Wild-Caught Fish, a groundbreaking report published at fishcount.org.uk. In most parts of the world it is now accepted that animals must be killed to become food. This act, in itself barbaric, should be carried out without suffering. Normally slaughter regulations require that animals be sedated before execution or that death must occur instantaneously or, in the case of ritual slaughter, as close to instant as possible, as the doctrine dictates.
Fishing kills barbarously
Not for fish. There is no humane slaughter obligation for fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most cases, for farmed fish. The fish caught in the nets of the fishing boats are unloaded on board the vessel and left to suffocate. In the commercial fishing technique known as longline fishing, trawlers release lines that can be many miles long, with hundreds or even thousands of hooks. Fish that take the bait are likely to remain fully conscious as they are hauled in for many hours with hooks drawn in their mouths, until the line is pulled in.
Likewise, commercial fishing often depends on gillnets, actual walls of thin nets in which fish become entangled, often with gills. They can suffocate in the net, because they can't breathe anymore. If not, they are trapped for many hours before the nets are pulled aboard.
The most startling revelation in the report, however, is the staggering number of fish humans inflict these heinous deaths on. Using the reported tonnages of various species of fish caught and dividing by the estimated average weights for each species, Alison Mood, the report's author, has put together what may be the first systematic estimate of the size of the annual global fishery. It is, she estimates, on the order of a trillion specimens.
A creepy dimension
Let's put this data into a larger context. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 60 billion land vertebrate animals are killed for human consumption each year — the equivalent of about nine animals for every human on the planet. If we take Mood's estimate of a trillion, the comparable figure for fish is 150 apiece. That doesn't include the billions of fish illegally caught or discarded, nor does it count live fish impaled on hooks as bait in angling.
Many of these fish are consumed by people, they are ground up to feed farm chickens or other industrially farmed fish. An industrial salmon farm uses 3–4 kg of fish for every kilogram of salmon it produces.
Let's assume that all of this fishing is sustainable, though it obviously isn't. It would be reassuring to know that killing on such a large scale doesn't matter, because fish feel no pain. But fish's nervous systems are similar enough to those of birds and mammals to think they feel pain.
The sensitivity of fish to pain
When fish experience something that causes pain to other animals, they behave in a suggestive way to pain and the change in their behavior can last quite a long time. Fish learn to avoid unpleasant experiences, such as those of electric shocks. And painkillers, as in people, reduce pain symptoms that would otherwise be overtly exhibited.
Victoria Braithwaite, a professor of marine biology at Pennsylvania State University, has spent more time than any other scientist investigating the topic of pain in aquatic beings. The recent book Do Fish Feel Pain? shows that fish not only feel pain, but are also much smarter than most people realize. Last year, a team of scientific experts from the European Union concluded that there is a great deal of evidence to indicate that fish experience pain.
Why are fish the forgotten victims on our plate? Is it because they are cold-blooded and covered in scales? Is it because they can't voice their pain? Whatever the explanation, the accumulating evidence shows that commercial fishing inflicts an unimaginable amount of pain and suffering. We must learn to catch and kill wild fish humanely or, if this is not possible, find less cruel and more sustainable alternatives to eat their meat.
