PREVIOUS ARTICLES ARCHIVE >>> Why Trout Don’t Sing the Blues I saw a television advertisement recently which involved a man in a suit singing into a live trout, as if it was a microphone. You’ve seen it, right? It wasn’t aired for very long. I must not have been the only one who felt a pang of anxiety for the poor fish, and heard themselves saying, out loud to the TV, "HEY! ASSHOLE! Put the FISH back in the WATER!". The point being that - given the length of time the trout was obviously being squeezed to death while simultaneously being starved of oxygen, and the number of ‘takes’ a scene like that would likely incur - what should have been funny wasn’t. Part of our discomfiture, even for someone who does not believe in the popular concept of ‘animal rights’, is based in the realisation that such a fine creature as a trout, even a fish-farm rainbow, deserves better treatment. The fact that I like trout is beside the point, I would have felt the same if it had been a chicken being held under water, and we all know how funny chickens are. Maybe the purposes of the ad - to make a joke, to sell something - were simply not sufficient. What are we responding to here? Cruelty of course, but in what is the feeling, the emotion, based? The garden variety argument is empathy, which is simply putting yourself in someone else’s shoes - in this case a trout’s shoes. You know, how would you feel if someone did that to you? We go, Yeah, right, poor wee fish...that cruel son of a bitch should be shot, by the way.’ Now, okay, that’s all fine, as far as it goes. No one really thinks we should shoot people for using trout as microphones (do they?). What seems to be the real problem here is that empathy thing. Just what are we empathising with? Do we truly imagine what it must be like for the fish, chicken, pig, fox, etc. - to be bred, penned, fed, cuddled, ridden, chased, caught, used as a microphone, killed, or released to pursue whatever it is wild things do when they are left alone (essentially all of the above, including eating their neighbours alive). Some people, including me, think the empathy with animals thing is more than a little off-plumb. For one thing, there seems to be a social gulf between us and the world of animals. I mean, they don’t behave like we do. I don’t know about you, but when I see a snake trying to choke down a live frog, I think, ‘Man, I couldn’t live like that!’ Then there is the brain capacity issue. Most of those critters just don’t possess enough grey matter for me to consider them as fellow citizens. There are plenty of folks who will wheel out the old whale/elephant argument to counter this, and, in that case, I’ll surrender. Yup, no argument - big brains all right. Tell it to the hungry farmer who just had his maize crop destroyed. Anyway, even if we did know what an elephant was thinking, I say that is the exception that proves the rule. Apart from our close cousins, the apes, and despite the best efforts of Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne to convince us otherwise, most animals are not much like us at all. The big difference between us and them is in the capacity for apperception. That is not just consciousness, or awareness, or even self-awareness - it is more like the awareness of self-awareness. If a big-brained chap like an elephant demonstrates what appears to loss, bereavement, anger, or revenge, we can give it the benefit of the doubt. We can say, well, okay, you never know - live and let live - just as long as it doesn’t eat my kids’ food. What we can’t say is, well, okay, if that goes for elephants - then it must go for foxes, rats, cats, chickens and fish. There is nothing in a fish’s behaviour, or in its measurable brain capacity and function, or in its observable responses to its environment and other creatures, which might lead us to make the same allowance we made for elephants and apes. This leads us to the conclusion that, for instance, the matter of pain and suffering is certainly different for humans than it is for a fish. I thought about this one sunny day on the Tay, as I momentarily admired a big buck grayling prior to its release. I noticed that its nose was worn raw and bloody, ground off at an extreme angle like an old spade, from grubbing among the riverbed stones for larvae, snails and other critters. It was clear to me that my little dry fly with its tiny barb was no discomfort at all to that old fish. It was only a painless point of contact, linked to an unseen meaningless pressure provided by me through the rod and line. Having had a much larger hook in my own lip, I know that even the comparatively sensitive human lip feels this as primarily as a pressure. I unhooked the fish and watched it swim, from all appearances carelessly, to whence it came. I know that grayling will not remember anything about that encounter - it can’t. But I will, for the rest of my conscious life. So, does being caught and killed - or caught and released - matter to a fish’s life? Morally speaking, just when does a fish’s life - or the quality of a fish’s life - begin to matter? The philosopher John Harris argues, “In order to value life, a being would have to be aware that it has a life to value...something like Locke’s conception of self-consciousness, which involves a person’s being able to ‘consider itself in different times and places’”, and is, “not simple awareness, but awareness of awareness. To value its own life, a being (in this case a fish) would have to be aware of itself as an independent centre of consciousness, existing over time with a future that it was capable of envisaging and wishing to experience.” Put simply, a fish’s life matters more to you and me than it does to the fish itself. It has neither experience of itself as an individual, nor the mental horsepower to envisage or wish anything. It does not perceive pain or suffering in anything like human terms, nor does it suffer mental anguish or post-traumatic stress disorder. A fish does not dream, need counselling, or sing the blues. A fish does not know love, hate, or happiness. A fish just is, a quality a buddhist respects without imagining them in little hats and jackets. I, on the other hand, need fish for my own happiness. I desire them, love fishing for them, especially wild trout and salmon, and cannot envisage my life without them or the strange and beautiful environments they inhabit. That human psychic need is why it is essential that we preserve wild fish and their environment. That utterly selfish desire to involve ourselves with them, to consider ourselves in those different places, wishing ourselves into that experience, is why fishing is good for fish.