Buy my photos!

Notecards for $2.40

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The Fish Market

There is a small fish market down the street from my apartment. I pass by there occasionally on my way to the bank. It seems that every time I walk by I see something that shocks me.

One time I saw the woman who works there scaling fish that were still alive, their blood splattering the metal pan she was holding them over. Another time, a fish had jumped out of his tank in an attempt at escape. It landed on the floor near a customer's shoe. The man looked down & nonchalantly kicked it under the counter, as if it were a carrot that had dropped on the floor. Today I was walking by the same fish market when I saw something flip out of the corner of my eye. I looked over & saw a fish writhing in a bucket filled with several other live fish whose tails & fins had all been cut off. Instead of water, they were swimming in blood.

In class one day, a student said that he didn't eat tuna because killing dolphins is cruel. I asked him why & he said that dolphins are intelligent. Did he mean that we shouldn't kill dolphins because they might be able to shed light on the origin of the universe? No. He said that the more intelligent the animal, the more pain they feel, so a dolphin would suffer a lot more than, say, a fish in the market. The other students around him agreed.

No comments: