Fishy Situation

Can you imagine that one day you are aimlessly roaming around your usual environment and you encounter a crowd of foreign looking extremities with 5 protrusions on each limb? Some of them are hairy, some shaven, but these strange… things begin to surround you and soon enough you are enclosed by them with no escape. You begin to here muffled noises getting loader and earthlings reaching towards you, soon enough you are above water unable to breath.

In recent weeks, one particular dolphin was receiving a lot of media coverage. A crowd of people in an Argentinian beach found that a baby female dolphin was close to shore they surrounded the creature picked it up from the water and proceeded to pass it around and take pictures with it. after a few minutes out of water, like any fish the dolphin died in the hands of the beach goers but they continued to take pictures with it even after death. Once they were satisfied with their photographs the dolphin was discarded on the sand like an empty tin can with no further purpose.

 

Credits to: Martina

Once the occurrences of this event became public, the online world was outraged.

What baffles me is that these people were so quick to judge the actions of others and so ignorant to see that which they do themselves. 

Commercial fishing occurs on a daily basis. This is where fish nets of immense sizes and capacities are thrown into the sea in areas where wild life is most abundant and railed back in with a crane onto a boat. In these nets for every pound of fish caught five pounds of untargeted species are trapped too.

Here we see a variety of whale species, dolphin species, shark species, turtle species, and many other animals that are not consumed by our markets legally. These animals, which yearly make up 2.7 trillion of the animals killed at sea, are part of the collateral damage that commercial fishing causes and they make up 5% of every catch. Their meat, useless to the catchers, is thrown back into the ocean once dead or sold in black markets are rarities.

Aside from fish markets there are fish farms. The concept seems odd doesn’t it? Visualize gigantically cattle sized fish tightly gathered around closed fences. Stress in these cramped cylindrical bins propel the fish into cannibalism from loss of sanity. When consuming fish from these fish farms, the stress hormones that they produced during their lives are now toxins in the food sold in markets making the consumer susceptible to possible diseases.

Credits to: Zachary Lehman 

The LosAngeles Time in, " Fish Farms Become Feedlots of the Sea", statedthat, " They're like floating pig farms... disease and parasites run rampant"

Commercial fish industries have some fishy business going on and the consumers have no clue.

When pulling fish out of water they experience a severe change in pressure which causes their stomachs to turn inside out, their eyes to bulge form their sockets, and their gills to collapse from an insufficient intake of oxygen that they receive from water molecules.

Fish and othersea creatures are the most abused of all the commercially consumed animals. Their inability to create noise audible to the human ear makes their screams unheard and un noticed but this does not mean they should not be treated with the same farness as all earths creatures.