22 ms·
I do not understand how a human can participate in finning. Amputation of the fins from a living, awake animal then tossing it into ocean while it thrashes aro
by ancapsfascists 4y ago
I do not understand how a human can participate in finning.
Amputation of the fins from a living, awake animal then tossing it into ocean while it thrashes around in pain.
There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity.
- xyzelement 4y agoDon't be sharks do that to people (replace fins with arms/legs) all the time? edit: I was kidding. Sorry shark lovers who took it seriously, I get it...
- joshmarinacci 4y agoNo. Shark attacks are incredibly rare. You’re more likely to be hit by lightning.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoSure, but lightning frequently strikes on land, whereas no shark attack has ever taken place on land.
- lostlogin 4y agoShark attacks do occur on land. Sharks snap when out the water, so they’ll bite someone for sure. I did a brief Google and found this account. 2015/01/27, 3:30 am Maui, Pali scenic lookout Fishing Water Depth: onshore Victim: M. Pollard Description: Lacerations to left calf. Considered a provoked incident due to activity. Shark: Requiem shark, length 4 feet. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/sharks/shark-incidents/incidents-list/ https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/sharks/shark-incidents/incidents-lis...
- KMag 4y agoThat reminds me of a time I went camping on a beach with a group of about 6 people. We found out one of the guys was afraid of sharks. We were walking after dark, about 20 meters from the water and a friend of a friend make a joke about "land shark", and the galeophobe jumped, turned, and asked "where?"
- thaumasiotes 4y agoThat is an attack in the same sense that when you step on a Lego at night, you are the victim of a Lego attack.
- function_seven 4y agoSharks are sharks, and humans are humans. We are not mere animals, we have civilizations and… humanity. Animals do all sorts of horrifying things to one another. I mean, when a human does gruesome, cruel things, we often call them “an animal”. We know better.
- xenospn 4y agoNo.
- waffleiron 4y agoI feel like you are underestimating the amount of mistreatment animals in factory farming go through. I really love sharks, but I think it’s cognitive dissonance to pretend factory farming does less harm. Even if per animal it doesn’t get as bad, the scale is incomparable.
- epgui 4y agoThat’s a whataboutism. Factory farming is a problem, yes, but it’s not the one the parent was talking about.
- waffleiron 4y agoYou call it whataboutism, I call it calling out hypocrisy. Saying: “ There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity.” when people excuse factory farming every day is hypocritical. It’s easy to disavow this because it doesn’t affect you.
- KerrAvon 4y agoIt's not calling out hypocrisy unless the poster also said "Mmm, love me some Tyson chickens." You don't know their stance on factory farming; they might even be a vegeratian.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- waffleiron 4y agoLeaving something out is often just as revealing. It’s easy to make a comment disavowing something that doesn’t affect you or most other commenters on HN.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 4y ago
- xenospn 4y ago
- waffleiron 4y agoThat’s a very western centric view, take Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism, each have major vegan or vegetarian traditions. Mainly due to concepts like Ahimsa, non violence against all living beings.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robomartin 4y ago> There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity. Being a descendant of genocide survivors I have come to understand that most people are good and organized groups or mobs can be evil beyond comprehension. That's just reality. It has nothing to do with profit. Genocides don't have profit as their root cause. The other problem is that, in the presence of extreme behavior the "moderates", despite being the overwhelming majority, are irrelevant and useless. The southern US border has been a major source of sex slavery and human trafficking (last I remember, about 40K per year, more now). And yet, the very politicians and the media who purport to be for human rights, fairness, compassion and, in particular, women's rights, do nothing to stop it and say nothing about it. In fact, they have been ignoring this to such a degree that the problem has reached indescribable proportions. If we can be brutal and cruel to human beings in such ways, why would we be kind to sharks?
- chronogram 4y agoI'm guessing there's group A who wants "fin nuggies" and group B who has 2 weeks reserved to wondering how to pay off rent tomorrow and the rising costs, and 2 weeks reserved to thinking how cool they'll be when they'll have a specific gadget. Not a lot of inhumanity to be placed on either of those groups.
- lend000 4y agoJust fishing in general is probably the most horrible form of hunting (imagine fighting for your life against a sharp hook caught in your mouth until you give in to pain and exhaustion and then die of asphyxiation and/or being beat and dehydrated). Which is at least quite brief compared to factory farming, as a sibling commenter mentioned. I think the reason shark fins get so much attention in the English speaking world is because most of us don't consume shark fins, so there's nothing for us to give up to decry an otherwise unspectacular act of cruelty.
- dmix 4y ago> imagine fighting for your life against a sharp hook caught in your mouth until you give in to pain and exhaustion and then die of asphyxiation and/or being beat and dehydrated Maybe I’m not a very compassionate person but its hard to appreciate if fish really are significantly beyond primitive levels of cognition (with obvious exceptions for dolphins, whales, and to a lesser extent sharks). Most of them would never think twice about murdering thousands to propagate their own species. Such is the fundamental nature of life we all were born into. The fact it’s an asphyxiation over ice over an hour vs being eaten alive in nature isn’t much of a big difference. But maybe like lobsters there’s a middle ground? The shark fin thing is clear bad idea but calling out fishing in general probably won’t win you many supporters.
- lamontcg 4y agoI'm trying to find words, but it is a bit weird seeing people being so compassionate about an apex predator. I'd lead instead with the fact that fishing is largely an ecological disaster. It is like the argument against eating meat based entirely on killing being bad, but we can see that killing happens all over the place in nature. However, the problem is that we've gotten way too good at killing and need to practice a lot more restraint.
- KMag 4y ago> I'm trying to find words, but it is a bit weird seeing people being so compassionate about an apex predator. Humans are the most apex of apex predators... I hope that doesn't disqualify us from deserving compassion.
- nradov 4y agoScuba diving around Monterey CA we sometimes observe sea lions killing mola molas (ocean sunfish) for sport. The sea lions bite the fins off but don't eat more than a couple bites, they just leave the crippled fish to sink to the bottom and slowly die. One time I saw about 10 half dead molas laying on the seafloor flopping around. I do support the ban on shark finning, but we should recognize that other animals can be just as vicious and destructive when they get a chance.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoThat does not justify our behavior when we can embody compassion, empathy, sympathy, ethics, and morals. I don’t know if sea lions developed those capabilities.
- KMag 4y agoI fully agree. In addition, to those who seem to feel we should extend compassion to creatures based on the degree to which they appear to extend compassion to other creatures... that would imply that to maximize the amount of compassion that should be extended to us, we should strive to extend as much compassion as possible to other creatures.
- ativzzz 4y agoWait until you find about the atrocities people commited to other people such as the atlantic slave trade or the holocaust
- KMag 4y agoI get you, but are you implying that we should only work on reducing one dimension of human cruelty at a time? That degree of serialization seems highly inefficient.
- ativzzz 4y agoI agree with you 100%, my point was that being surprised at the capability of humans to be cruel, lack empathy, and destroy is itself a sort of lack of empathy and understanding - traits that ultimately lead to the first three traits I described A weird ironic twist of the irrationality of our brains (my comment was poor attempt at sarcasm over the internet)
- thou423oi4234 4y agoI'm amazed by the West's ability to care about animals. Yeah, I'm sure those billions being tortured and killed in your animal farms don't have brains as or more developed compared to sharks or dogs or whatever else has come into the good graces of your elites. Clearly a miniscule number of sharks being killed (worse in another way, yes, since they're not domesticated and endangered) is way less civilized than these billions treated in the most horrible of ways. This has nothing to do with meat-eating. The entirety of the modern world has become so much crueler to animals that it is astonishing we consider ourselves to be more civilized than our ancestors.That this farce of 'western progress' goes on (even in the East) is doubly amusing.
- KMag 4y agoHow is this not whataboutism? I suspect there's significant overlap between the group of people opposed to shark finning and the group of people opposed to factory farming. We don't need to solve one before the other. Why not make progress on both in parallel, rather than use lack of progress in one to drag our feet on the other?
- Blue111 4y ago> There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity. I think it's like a religion for them... complete lack of common sense.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
- tstrimple 4y agoBased on what I’ve seen from humanity, finning is right up their alley. We can’t even agree that trans folk should be treated as human. Who gives a fuck about fish?
- KMag 4y agoI agree that humans do some pretty crappy things. I'm all for equal rights and treatment for trans folks. However, that sounds like a straw man: I don't think I've ever read or heard anyone claim that trans folks shouldn't be treated as humans.
- Blue111 4y agoWhy do they throw away the valuable meat?
- jacurtis 4y agoSpace. The fins take up very little space on the boat and is worth 100x the value of the meat. So they'd rather keep one small shark fin than the whole shark.
- KMag 4y agoThe meat is less valuable than the fins on a volume basis, and volume of the cargo hold/transport rate back to shore is likely the limiting factor on their harvest rate.
- SequoiaHope 4y agoI agree it is deeply inhumane. However it is still very common for people to eat meat from factory farms, or veal which is inherently tortured. I used to have a kind of cognitive barrier about these things. They come in the store all packaged up in little cubes or whatever. But then I became vegan, and those mental barriers were no longer necessary for me. Now when I see the industrial production of animal flesh for human consumption, it is a deeply gruesome concept. Even the word "meat" is a sort of euphemism so we don't think about the flesh and body parts we consider food. It's all inhumane, but we purposefully do the inhumane parts far away from where it is consumed. The people doing the killing are often there due to economic necessity, and have their fair share of mental trauma from the inhumanity of it all. We have a lot farther to go.
- themitigating 4y agoSure let me provide an excuse for you. Most people don't care about things unless it affects them. They were taught this by their parents and peer. They don't think they are wrong. That's it
- snowwrestler 4y agoMadison Stewart is a shark protection advocate who has gone to Indonesia repeatedly to study and engage with shark fisherman there. She reports that they do it to provide for their families and community. That's a powerful motivator, and shark finning is lucrative to poor communities. Folks interested in learning more can look up Project Hiu. I follow her @sharkgirlmadison on Instagram, where she posts pretty regularly.
- not_the_fda 4y agoThe problem isn't the fisherman, the problem is the people buying the shark fins.
- survirtual 4y agoHow is this even a headline in the current year? US congress is living in 1930 while AI and fusion are emerging. These obviously cruel and inhumane practices should have been dealt with a long time ago, and the focus should now be on data privacy, antitrust, affordable housing, clean energy, exploitation of space, ethical AI, and all other related issues to shepherd humanity into a bright future. But instead, they’re still spinning tires over pre-internet age ideas of cruelty and reopening wounds of settled policies? This congress does not represent modern humankind.
- phantomathkg 4y agoWhat's next? Shall we cut the hair of sheep to produce wool?
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoSheep can live without hair. Also hair doesn't have feeling.