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glow in the dark fishies
"Toni" wrote in message rthlink.net...
"Chuck Gadd" wrote in message ... So you think that wild caught fish are automatically mistreated? Knowing full well that you'll probably come back with 100 reasons I'm wrong g- I believe that to interfere to the extent of physically removing a creature from its natural environment is the ultimate abuse. The percentage that die is unacceptable- how big is that pile of dead Cardinal Tetras in the sky? Plus the trauma of being yanked from your home and being slapped into a plastic bag? Simply so they can live in a box in your home? As humans can we really *be* that presumptuous? I believe it is simply not our right to intrude on their lives. I also don't believe in zoos, captive animals, or a hundred other abuses our present society condones. I believe that "dominion over the animals" is not a license to redetermine their fate, but a gentle edict to respect their right to exist as equal to our own. I believe that "animal viewing" exhibitions may have started innocently enough as a way for common folk to see up close and personal all the creatures that the explorers wrote home about, but that time is now past. The concept went bad pretty early on IMO- when the first animal died. We have the Discovery Channel now for viewing the wonders of the wild kingdom. I also might need to mention that I have worked in the pet shop/circus/companion animal field for over 30 years and have seen more than my share of animals faring badly at the hand of man. I sort of hope this is a troll. We're all guilty of the occasional oversimplification but the view that aquarium (or any) fish has "their right to exist as equal to our own" is more than a tad extreme as is "it is simply not our right to intrude on their lives." (we'll assume you're vegan, but how do you justify intruding on the life of vegetables? Do the screams of butternut squash keep you up at night?) I'm all for treating our finned charges humanely and maintaining their tank environments respectfully because we, generally, have assumed that burden in making the decision to keep fish. But I'm also pretty comfortable with our position as a species on top of the food chain. Remember folks: we aren't intruding on some grand environmental equation that would be harmonious and static but for our bumbling; we're part of the equation and it is dynamic and non-linear--we and our bumbling are part of the grand equation(or at least this part of it). Species going extinct for a variety of reasons is part of evolution; it may not be wise of us to blithely obliterate some species--but it is rather difficult to tell a subsistance farmer in South America not to feed his kids because we (from the comfort of our air conditioned keyboard cubes) need to perpetuate the habitat of a micro shrew that may or may not exist elsewhere and likely has very little impact on our survival as a species. There are lots of folks to blame for the overly romanticized view of nature implied here, from Rosseau to Disney. Rachael Carson's alarmist style has also muddied the discourse. Think beyond the greenpeace bumper stickers. Enjoy your grilled salmon. |
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