Raise your hand if you’ve ever met someone proud of their decision not to eat meat “for the animals” but who occasionally consumes fish. While it’s not our place or intention to judge the choices of these individuals, we do, however, want to shine a light on an issue: not eating meat “for the animals” but eating fish—how could this be an action taken for the welfare of animals?
First of all, it seems redundant to remind everyone that fish is meat, and any vegetarian who eats fish cannot be considered a vegetarian. Despite being distant and different from us and any non-aquatic animal, it is an indisputable fact that fish are animals, and many studies have shown that – despite their inability to produce any kind of sound – fish suffer like any other animal.
The choice to eat fish meat but not that of a chicken or a calf – just like the decision to exclude lamb from one’s diet but not other types of meat – is the result of the speciesist thinking of our society: we are accustomed to viewing animals as deserving or undeserving of our love, forgetting that the measure of judgment is always the partiality of our species. It would also be reductive to simply talk about “love”. As we’ve mentioned, it’s not true that vegans love all animals just because they’ve embraced this lifestyle choice, but this is beyond the respect we owe to individuals of any other species.
We are taught that it’s right and “normal” to consider other living beings as consumer goods, but also to divide animals into categories: there are those “for profit,” those “to love,” and all the others. Those unfortunate enough to be considered “for profit,” depending on the latitude they are found, are deprived of their individuality and freedom. That applies all the more so to fish, whose number of individuals caught each year is so high that it must be expressed in weight.
Deciding not to eat meat “for the animals” while continuing to eat fish is a speciesist thought. It only confirms our distorted view of other animals and the arbitrary categorization we place them in. From an ethical standpoint, it’s no better.
