17 Comments
Jul 26, 2023Liked by Bentham's Bulldog

Thank you for bringing our attention to the horrific treatment of fish. I didn't know fish farming was so inhumane.

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I believe the 3-8 billion / year figure refers to all killed fishes (mostly wild caught). To know if fish farming is the worst crime, one would need to know how many fishes live and die in farms specifically.

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I think you underplay the “fish are dumb” argument a bit. The dumbness of a fish isn’t like a dumb human, not even a mentally disabled human. It is, or might be, like lacking basic capacities which are relevant to the ability to suffer. (Memory, anticipation, self-evaluation...)

Pushing this to an extreme case - what about ants? There are maybe 20 million billion of them... My intuition is that ant suffering doesn’t matter much. I sure hope not.

Or maybe fish are smarter than I think? More information would be valuable here.

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Reagrding fishing, I don't do it, but are you sure it's net bad? I mean the fish would probably over-reproduce anyway, no?

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What do you think of exterminators? Literally their entire job is to get rid of things considered pests, which they usually do by killing them.

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