is eating fish really that bad?

[Spiritual Mike]

Originally Posted by Altair

So do all animals that are deliberately killed when humans need to eat food (domesticated or wildlife). With this topic of fish it's once again a matter of ecology, and not human projection of ''rights''. If it's about rights than the dolphins and the bears shouldn't eat fish too, as fish ''suffer'' at the hands of other animals as well.

Veganism conflates ethics with ecology/environment. As I've done volunteering for a number of environment and nature organizations over many years I've come across a fair number of vegans and this conflation and inability to see that the two (animal welfare and environment) don't always match is a painful show to watch.

This is about ecology, not ''suffering''. If it was about suffering than no human or animal should exist in this world because their breeding will continue to perpetuate suffering. So ask yourself if this is really about ''suffering'' or something else.

The difference between a bear eating a fish and human eating fish are quite vast. The bear only intends to kill the one fish or enough fish to feed him and his family. He also likely has no real other options than fish to survive, unlike the modern human being who mostly who has options from the grocery store. So we can choose to try commit the least suffering possible.

Also the bear does not have trawlers which deplete the ocean of billions of sea life, including non target species. The bear also doesn't have factory farmed fish systems, where fish are crowded and suffer from not being able to move freely, similar to the lives of chickens and other creatures who cannot move in cages or highly crowded and dirty sheds in factory farms.

We also don't expects bears to be moral agents, but just because they can't doesn't mean we as humans shouldn't try to make considerate choices and try to commit the least amount of harm possible in our given situation.

For those reasons and more it is clear that there's a major difference between a wild animal hunting what they need for survival and humans mass breeding and mass producing animals for the purpose of eating them in absurd numbers and far far beyond what our actual need to eat them would be (I don't believe we actually need to eat them anyway and I'm doing fine as a vegan).