PETA Goes After Fishmongers in Seattle
Posted by DDOCS in Stupidity, tags: Economy, Money, StupidityIn Seattle, one of the biggest tourist attractions is the Pike Place Fish Market. The fishmongers are known for being robustly energetic with their product. Fish from the day’s catch are thrown around–sometimes even over the customers’ heads–as workers move the fish from place to place. If you want a more descriptive account, here’s an example video from Seattle Travel.
PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, doesn’t agree with this practice because they think it’s cruel to the fish. The dead fish. They plan to protest an exhibition of the practice at an upcoming veterinarian conference held in Seattle. PETA believes the tossing of dead fish is disrespectful to the animal. The dead animal. They feel it shows a “callous disregard” for the suffering it went through to make it to the table. They would eventually like the practice to stop inside the Fish Market as well.
“Killing animals so you can toss their bodies around for amusement is just twisted,” said Ashley Byrne, senior campaigner for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Washington, D.C.
Really? Is that why the fish were killed? They’re just thrown around? They’re just props at a carnival?
As far as I can tell, the animals weren’t killed just to boost the tourism at Pike Place. Common sense dictates that the fishmongers throw the dead (read: no longer alive) fish in order to move them from one place to another. It happens they developed a quick and elaborate method that is efficient for their business.
The fish are an important source of food for many as well as an important source of income for the employees. And not just the employees of Pike Place. If Pike Place flourishes, so do the distributors, fisherman, manufacturers of fishing equipment, and so on, and so on. If Pike Place can increase the likelihood that these sources continue to succeed, they affect a lot of jobs.
Remember, this discussion isn’t about whether fishing is right or wrong. It’s about how the already deceased fish are handled. Is this really where all this energy should be focused?
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Would that this were PETA’s first example of the absurd lengths to which they take the insanely wrong notion that animals have rights.
Note that they bothered to write Yasser Arafat about killing a donkey, but failed to condemn the fact that the donkey was used TO KILL HUMANS:
http://www.peta.org/feat/arafat/
Naturally, when an entire movement is based on an irrational premise, hypocrisy is no problem either. PETA argues that eating meat is murder, but two of its employees were caught in NC picking up dogs from local shelters and then killing them within minutes and dumping the carcasses in the dumpster behind the local Piggly Wiggly supermarket. So, if the animal is valuable to humans (as food), it should be saved, but if it has been discarded by humans (an unwanted pet), it should be killed.
There is only one explanation for this kind of moral inversion: the notion that humans are intrinsically evil and a blight upon the earth. It’s medieval religious claptrap of the St. Augustine variety, secularized, writ large and projected onto the otherwise reasonable notion that you shouldn’t abuse pets or be unnecessarily cruel when slaughtering animals for food.
hahahaha, this must be the onion, stupid PETA, they forget the that people have to eat.
[...] has had an interesting past couple of days. Not long after getting upset at the Pike Place Fish Market employees for “callously” throwing fish, the animal-rights group is taking President [...]