Jewish vegetarians argue that Jews should
eliminate, or at least sharply reduce, their
consumption of animal products because the realities
of animal-based diets and agriculture are sharply
inconsistent with basic Jewish mandates to take care
of our health, treat animals with compassion,
preserve the environment, conserve resources, share
with hungry people, and seek and pursue peace.
However, many people who abstain from eating
mammals and birds continue to eat fish, sometimes
arguing that problems associated with the production
and consumption of other animal products do not
apply to fish. After all, they reason, fish are not
raised under extremely cruel, confined conditions on
factory farms; unlike the raising of livestock,
fishing does not cause the erosion and depletion of
soil, require the destruction of forests to create
pastureland and land to grow feed crops, and require
huge amounts of pesticides and irrigation water;
also, fish is generally lower in fat than other
animal products, and is often erroneously considered
a healthy food.
Let us consider vegetarian arguments as they
apply to the "production" and consumption of
fish:
1. Compassion for animals
Too often, we tend to class fish with plants
rather than with animals. Yet, unlike edible plants,
fish are vertebrate animals with highly developed
nervous systems. Dr. Donald Bloom, professor of
animal welfare at Cambridge University, reminds us
that "the scientific literature is quite clear.
Anatomically, physiologically, and biologically, the
pain system in fish is virtually the same as in
birds and mammals." Fishing is not painless for fish
by any means. When fish are hauled up from the deep,
the sudden change in pressure on their bodies causes
painful decompression which often leads their gills
to collapse and their eyes to pop out. As soon as
fish are removed from the water, they begin to
suffocate. Hooked fish struggle because of physical
pain and fear. As Dr. Tom Hopkins, professor of
marine science at the University of Alabama
describes it, getting hooked on a line is "like
dentistry without novocain, drilling into exposed
areas."
Fish that are "farmed," as opposed to caught, do
not have an easier existence. Most trout, catfish,
and many other species eaten in the United States
are raised in modern "fish factories," where they
are subject to the same intensive, crowded
conditions as land farm animals. Modern aquaculture
trends involve large-scale, highly mechanized fish
production, much like the chicken industry. Like
crowded broiler chickens, fish are crammed in
enormous pools called "raceways," where they are
pushed to gain weight far faster than is natural.
Experiments aim to find the greatest number of fish
that can be raised per cubic foot of water in order
to maximize profits. Under these very crowded,
unnatural conditions, fish suffer from stress,
infections, parasites, oxygen depletion, and gas
bubble disease, akin to "the bends" in human beings.
To prevent the spread of diseases among the fish,
large amounts of antibiotics are used.
It's also worthwhile to point out that fish are
not the only animals to suffer because of people's
appetite for their flesh. Egrets, hawks, and other
birds who eat fish are often shot or poisoned to
prevent them from eating fish at large open pools
where fish are raised. In one documented case, a
California company with a U. S. Fish and Wildlife
permit to shoot 50 birds annually in the late 1980s
was estimated to kill 10,000 to 15,000 birds,
including many species not listed on the permit.
Also many non-target animals, including sea turtles,
dolphins, sea birds, and other fish, die horribly in
commercial fishing nets.
2. Health
Fish is often considered a healthy food. However,
while fish is generally lower in fat than other
animal products, it has no fiber and virtually no
complex carbohydrates or vitamin C, contains
excessive amounts of protein and none none of the
protective phytochemicals and antioxidants found
only in foods of plant origin. The average American
consumes far more protein than required, and much
less fiber than is necessary. The overconsumption of
protein, in particular, has been linked to several
health problems, including kidney stones and
osteoporosis, while the lack of fiber may contribute
to several diseases related to the digestive
process, such as diverticulosis and colon cancer.
Also, not all fish are low in fat; salmon, for
example, has 52 percent of its calories as fat.
Fish does possess the heart-protective omega-3
fatty acid, EPA (eicosopentaenoic acic), but EPA is
made by both fish and humans from the essential
omega-3 fatty acid, alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), and
that in turn is made in the chloroplasts of green
plants (e.g. algae, spinach). ALA can be obtained
from many plant foods, including green leafy
vegetables, flaxseed, canola, soybean, and walnut
oils, tofu, pumpkin, and wheat germ and these plant
foods generally come without the nutritional hazards
of fish.
The greatest health hazard from eating fish,
however, comes from the depradations we humans have
caused in their natural environment. Fish and
shellfish are repositories for the industrial and
municipal wastes and agricultural chemicals flushed
into the world's waters. Consider PCBs, a synthetic
liquid once widely used for industrial purposes.
Recognized as carcinogenic in the late 1970's, their
production was barred in the UNited States, though
their use in this country in the United States and
worldwide continues.
A six-month investigation by Consumers Union
(publishers of Consumer Reports magazine),
concluded: "By far the biggest source of PCBs in the
human diet is fish.... As PCBs linger in the
environment, their composition changes, and they
gradually become more toxic...these more toxic forms
are likely to be found in fish.... PCBs accumulate
in body tissue. The PCBs that you eat today will be
with you decades into the future." Consumers Union
found PCBs in 43 percent of the salmon, 25 percent
of the swordfish, and 50 percent of the lake
whitefish they checked.
Other pollutants that concentrate in sea
creatures include pesticides; toxic metals including
lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, and arsenic;
dioxins; and radioactive substances such as
strontium 90. Because of biological magnification
during movement up the food chain, these pollutants
can reach levels as much as 9 million times that of
the water in which the fish live, and they have been
linked to many health problems, including impaired
behavioral development in young children. Nursing
infants consume half of their mother's load of PCBs,
dioxin, DDT, and other deadly toxins.
Consumers Union's tests also showed that nearly
half the fish tested from markets in New York City,
Chicago, and Santa Cruz, CA, were contaminated by
bacteria from human or animal feces. In addition,
fish often are loaded with disease-causing worms and
parasites. Many of the diseases fish harbor can only
be treated in humans with antibiotics. However,
because of the way fish are raised - in crowded
conditions on "aquatic" farms - fish factories give
these same antibiotics to the fish to preserve their
"crop." increasing numbers of bacteria are becoming
resistant to the drugs, making the treatment of some
diseases more difficult in humans.
3. Environmental Impacts
If we aren't worried about the impact eating fish
will have on our own health, we should be concerned
about the impact fishing has on the earth's health.
Modern commercial fishing use vast "factory"
trawlers the size of football fields, with huge nets
sometimes miles long that swallow up everything in
their path. The result is that thirteen of the
world's seventeen major fisheries are depleted or in
serious decline, and the other four are considered
"over exploited" or "fully exploited."
The World Conservation Union lists over 1,000
fish worldwide as endangered or threatened. Over 100
Pacific salmon communities are already extinct and
dozens more are seriously depleted. Researchers have
found the biodiversity of the oceans rivals that of
the tropical rain forests, but today we are
effectively "clear cutting" these precious
underwater environments with our appetite for fish.
Some waters that were once teeming with life are now
so barren they have been compared to a "dust
bowl."
Depleted fisheries have ripple effects throughout
the entire marine ecosystem. Major predator-prey
situations have been changed. For example, a decline
in pollock in western Alaska has caused a 90 percent
decline in Steller sea lions which caused the
National Marine Fisheries Service to give them the
designation of "threatened" in 1990 and "endangered"
in 1997. Loss of sea lions deprived killer whales of
their primary source of nutrition and they have
shifted to eating sea otters. As a result, sea
otters have also declined by 90 percent since 1990,
resulting in a surge by their prey, sea urchins. The
ecological principle that "everything is connected
to everything else" is dramatically illustrated
here.
The environmental impact of aquatic farming is
also cause for concern. First, wild stocks are
displaced as introduced fish invade spawning grounds
and compete for food. Interbreeding pollutes the
genetic pool. A study of forty extinct fish species
by the National Fisheries Research Centre in the U.
S. indicated that species introduced at aquatic
farms helped wipe out 68 percent of the indigenous
species.
Second, fish farming depletes natural resources.
Modern commercial fishing is extremely energy
intensive. It requires as much as twenty calories of
fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food
energy from fish. Production of fish food is fifty
to one hundred times as energy intensive as
production of plant food, even when the plant foods
are produced with modern technology.
Moreover, where fish are grown in artificial
ponds, vast amounts of water are required as the
medium of growth, to replenish oxygen, and to remove
wastes from the aquatic system. Raising a ton of
fish on an aquatic farm requires 8 tons of water,
almost the 8.5 tons of water needed to raise a ton
of grain-fed beef. At a time of increasing droughts
and demands for water to meet many essential needs,
this is very significant. This great need for water
has caused further environmental destruction too, as
aquaculture is routinely conducted on coastal land
cleared of mangrove forests, the prime breeding and
spawning ground for many fish. To date, about half
the world's mangrove forests have been cleared,
drained, or filled to make room for fish farms.
4. Seeking and Pursuing Peace
The Jewish sages, commenting on the fact that the
Hebrew words for bread and war come from the same
root, stated that shortages of grain and other
resources makes war more likely. The truth of their
words is illustrated by the increasing battles over
increasingly scarce fish in many areas. A United
Nations official describes the situation on the high
seas as "the emerging anarchy in the oceans." With
so many vessels scouring increasingly fished-out
waters, squabbles and confrontations are expanding.
Russians have attacked Japanese vessels in the
Northwest Pacific. Scottish fishers have attacked a
Russian trawler. A Falkland Islands' patrol chased a
Taiwanese squid boat more than 4,000 miles.
Norwegian patrols cut the nets of three Icelandic
ships in the Arctic, and exchanged shots. The UN
reported a 10 percent escalation in piracy and armed
robberies directed toward ships, many of them
fishing vessels.
In summary, the "production" and consumption of
fish is harmful to human health, causes great
suffering to the fish, threatens the ocean's
biodiversity, wastes resources, and makes national
conflicts more likely. Hence, an end to, or at least
a sharp decline in, the consumption of fish and
other animal products is a societal imperative and
arguably a Jewish imperative.
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