Perhaps on the day of the protest, the fish mongers can toss PETA members instead?

“If God did not want us to eat animals, He wouldn’t have made them out of meat.”

PETA/PITA – Pain – In – The – A@@

Bring the culture of fish to your orgnization.
It began as FISH, the movie and its sequel FISH STICKS and now the blockbuster FISH, The Musical.
http://www.charthouse.com/content.aspx?name=home2

Sorry, PETA that fish has already been gutted, fried in butter and served with a slice of lemon.

The reason given for this is that there was abuse of the animals in the slaughter houses. How true this is is hard to determine – when you’re producing food to consumed by humans, you generally have to maintain a certain quality of the meat so that it’s _suitable_ for food, so the abuse claimed is at least questionable. In addition, what give PETA the right to determine what some ethnic group can morally eat or not? Thirdly, if abuse in the slaughterhouses was the issue, why not write legislation that would insure steep penalties should such abuse occur? Someone also needs to convince PETA that just because a killed animal convulses does _not_ mean the animal is still “alive” and capable of feeling pain. And if the animals did in fact feel pain, how is it any less when they are consumed by 4 legged creatures than by 2 legged creatures?

PETA. I cannot think of the words that would describe my feelings toward them. Animals do not have rights because they cannot assume responsibilities. _Humans_ have responsibilities, and one of them is to cause as little pain and distress to the animals in their care as possible, but the animals don’t have _rights_.

An ethical fisherman would simply set up housekeeping on the boat with the fish, tending to its needs until it dies. At that point, the fisherman would not be commiting an immoral act by eating the fish.

In pondering such a question one sees the long-term goal of PETA emerge clearly… eating fish is wrong, for killing them is barbaric and evil.

The only acceptable means of taking a fish for human consumption is to coax it into your boat, and there, via some means, kill it in such a way that it suffers zero pain. Coax it gently and persuasively.

And that point leads me to a digression concerning Orson Scott Card’s brilliant books, Enders Game and Speaker For The Dead. Especially the second of these.

In “Speaker”, Card posits a planet devastated by a virus such that there are an extremely limited number of species. One species is a teddy-bear like animal that begins life as a “semi-grub infant” nurtured by a “tree”, growing into teddy-bear form upon release from the “tree” – and upon teddy-bear death transforms by growing into a new “tree”. A closed circle of life.

The purpose of my digression: When a teddy-bear creature require wood, it walks up to a “tree” and talks to it, and the tree voluntarily gives up its life, falls over, and splits naturally into tens or hundreds of all the wooden implements that the teddy bear(s) require for their daily lives.

The teddy bear talks gently to the tree, coaxes it unto death, and voluntarily the tree gives itself up for the purpose of the teddy-bear tribe. Just like, one suspects, PETA wishes we would coax our fish gently into our boats.

In pondering fish coaxing, I was struck by the problem with Card’s premise: Why should any one tree among thousands just give itself up? Where’s the tree that says, “Hey, I’m enjoying myself here right now! Choose one of those other hundreds of trees around me! Hell no, I’m not ready to go yet. Choose someone else.”

And why not? Why does the teddy bear get to choose which tree is the one to die? Why don’t the trees, a more mature form of teddy-bear life, determine this? No, the teddy bear CHOOSES the tree, and every single time without fail, that tree is the one that keels over and serves teddy-bear purposes.

It’s an unsustainable premise once you dig just a little deep. I wonder why that never occurred to me before. Perhaps it never occurred to me because the first time I read these books, I was still a confirmed liberal. 9-11 hadn’t happened yet, to set me on my path to conservatism.