In awe of fish? Exploring animal ethics for non-cuddly species

Abstract

Though rarely counted as individuals, fish are by far the most consumed animals in the world, outnumbering all other food animals combined. These widely eaten animals are generally conceived of as dull and mindless creatures, ‘swimming protein to be plucked from rivers and seas’. Over the past several years, however, evidence has been amassed which indicates that fish are more sentient and intelligent than their alleged ‘three second memory’ would imply. Thus far these findings have had only limited success in arousing public interest in fish welfare. Today still fish are rarely discussed or treated as sentient beings that feel pain and suffer. A series of exploratory workshops with professionals working in a variety of fish-related fields suggested that the reason that people have a hard time appreciating the perspective of fish is not so much a lack of knowledge about fish sentience. Instead it may have more to do with the perceived inability of fish to strike up meaningful relations with humans: they are quintessentially non-cuddly animals, cold, slimy, and with their unblinking and sideways directed eyes they don’t have a ‘face’ to us. Many people however know that some fish species display amazing abilities, such as being able to swim to the Sargasso Sea and back to the river they came from, as the eel does. Such animals seem to generate awe and perhaps respect not for to some extent resembling humans, but by their being different and quintessentially ‘other’ – precisely for us having trouble to imagine their life form. The type of affect generated by this sense of otherness differs markedly from the common modes of caring about animals based on nearness, empathy and direct interaction, and is more akin to aesthetic experiences evoked around environmental concerns. In discussion with recent work in relational animal ethics, environmental aesthetics, and more-than-human geography, this paper explores the potential of the experience of awe as motivating and guiding an ethics for (farmed) fish. By attending to discourses and material practices concerned with fish, fisheries and fish farming, the challenges of particular understandings of an ‘ethics of awe’ are considered, including the question of whether and in what ways awe could be expressed as and translated into consumer preferences.