There Is No Such Animal as "Seafood"

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-11-05 14:53:00 UTC
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I've probably said this before, but even if so, it bears repeating periodically: there is no such animal as "seafood." There are lots and lots of kinds of fishes and lots and lots of kinds of crustaceans and lots and lots of other aquatic animals. But last I checked, we haven't named a single one of them "seafood."

And even though their world looks different from ours, and they don't function in all the same ways we do, they're far smarter than most people assume. And their deaths -- whether from being gutted alive, from being boiled alive, from ruptured organs through decompression, from panicked suffocation, or via any other means -- are full of suffering, fear, and intense pain.

And causing them that suffering and killing them for so-called seafood dishes is as unnecessary as killing pigs for "pork" or chickens for "chicken" and eggs or cows and calves for "dairy."

Fishes and other water-dwelling animals aren't seafood. They're animals.

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Photo by Flickr user laszlo-photo

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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