Don’t Think of Them as “Fish” but rather as “Sea Kittens”
January 25th, 2009
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I have to admit that I really love fish. They’re just delicious. I also love fishing, and then eating those fish. Generally I’m one for fresh water fishing. To me, there’s nothing better than a nice dinner of fried brown trout, caught fresh that day and only dispensed with a short time before being cooked. Fresh water trout are just great with a little beat-battering and catching them yourself seems to add an extra feeling to the meal.
But apparently I don’t love fish in the way that PETA loves fish. So what has PETA done about it? Well, they decided to change the name of “Fish” to “Sea Kittens.” This is a common tactics in public relations and political correctness. You may have noticed that used cars have been replaced by “preowned cars” and that toilet paper is now called “bathroom tissue.”
Here’s what PETA says about their campaign:
People don’t seem to like fish. They’re slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads—which is weird, to say the least. Plus, the small ones nibble at your feet when you’re swimming, and the big ones—well, the big ones will bite your face off if Jaws is anything to go by.
Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy—stat. Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You’ve done enough damage, buddy. We’ve got it from here. And we’re going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it’s time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?
Well, it’s been said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Fish, by any other name are also… just as fishy. You can call them sea kittens if you want, but they still are slimey. That’s not even a bad thing either. Many fish are slimey because they’re covered with a layer of mucus-like goo that protects their scales and has antibacterial properties. If you were to scrub off the slime, the fish could experience damage to their scales or even die. They have pointy heads because it’s more hydrodynamic.
Despite PETA creating images of a happy cartoony little girl holding a “sea kitten,” the reality is that they don’t like to be held and cuttled. Actually, the fish would probably try to squirm away for a short while, before dying, since (most) fish can’t breathe air.
PETA also has some fun stories about how ’sea kittens’ love to play, learn and are so very smart, creative fun, cuddly and so on. Well, I hate to break this to everyone, but fish don’t actually have names and in general, they’re not the brightest members of the animal kingdom. Fish, which are of the philum Chordate, are a very diverse group of species which can be as large as the whale shark all the way down to nearly microscopic. Some fish are actually fairly intellegent. These include stingrays, some sharks and other ocean species. Of course, “Intellegent” is a relative term here. There has been some work done to evaluate the intellegence of fish, and while a few can be taught to do some simple functions, they’re not exactly up there with primates.
I probably don’t need to say much more about it. This campaign may be a little tongue-in-cheak, but the ridiculousness of it should be apparent to just about anyone.
Of course, if you do happen to agree that “sea kittens” are really cure, cuddly little buddies that need to be protected, then I suppose that makes for a powerful argument for the practices of whaling (at least of the toothed whales), seal hunting and killing off penguins and polar bear, because those murderous animals kill untold numbers of sea kittens. Thus, killing a single whale could save the lives of thousands upon thousands of sea kittens. And unlike fishermen, they don’t even respect catch size quotas, seasons or other restrictions on what kind of sea kittens they can murder.
Thanks to the reader who submitted this link
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Just LAME, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 25th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Ha ha ha ha … just when I thought that PETA couldn’t get any more ridiculous!
Does PETA plan to engage in a large-scale euthanasia project for unwanted “sea kittens” now?
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January 25th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
PETA-type always make me think of this from Chowderhead Bazoo’s Bane of My Existence: Food-Hating Tower of Maintenance
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January 25th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
I want to disagree with you but I honestly can’t on this.
But fishing is unsustainable so I don’t eat much fish. I mostly eat organic eggs and things like that for proteins, also there’s the problem of mercury due to Bush’s lax mercury emission standards.
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January 25th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Bruce said:
Fishing is not inherently unsustainable. Overfishing certain fisheries is, that is for sure. But there are plenty of ways that one can fish without any issues with enviornmental impact. For example, freshwater stocking programs and moderate fishing stay decently in balance. Cod and haddock can sustain pretty heavy fishing, as long as it does not go beyond a critical limit at which point the reproductive capabilities of an area become unstable.
Some fisheries have been able to be pretty well balanced through good regulation. Also, there’s always fish farming and so on.
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January 25th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Bruce said:
Much as I think Bush’s policies on energy have been pretty bad, I don’t know how much blame can be pinned to Bush on this one. The US does account for a lot of coal burning, but so do India, China, Russia, Germany and others. I think in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t be fair to pin it on one country’s policies. Germany has been increasing in coal consumption and so have china and India, outpacing the US. It takes time to get into fisheries anyway
I wouldn’t worry too much about mercury in fish as the levels are low in most sea fish.
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January 25th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Q said:
Wow finally someone on this blog who agrees that Bush’s loan gaurentees to the nuclear industry and blocking of renewable power was bad. I also don’t appreciate his obsession with drilling which is a sham – it wouldn’t produce oil for a decade.
I think Mercury in the fish is a concern for pregnant women mostly. But still it isn’t good and the less the better.
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January 25th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Any fishery can be managed to provide regular, sustainable catches, the problem with ocean stocks is first getting international agreement, and then enforcing it. The Grand Banks is a prime example of this. Canadian and American authorities stopped their own fleets from working the area when stock populations plummeted, only to watch European vessels continue to fish in direct defiance of their own governments regulations. Or should I say stated regulations as these same countries did not send out ships to interdict the fishing, nor were the ships arrested when they got back. In fact they were allowed to land their catch, and were slapped with token fines.
The idea that ocean fisheries are managed is a cruel joke.
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January 25th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Bruce said:
No. Don’t put words in my mouth. The loan gaurentees were one of the few good things he did. His energy policy sucks for a number of reasons. For one thing, he didn’t do enough to promote nuclear energy especially relating to reforming the regulatory system. He didn’t make it any easier to build nuke plants.
Also, his support for ‘clean coal’ is a joke. There’s no such thing as clean coal and we should be trying to stop using coal and not support it in any way.
Drilling I support. We should have done more decades ago, but it’s only an interim measure. ANWR should have been opened a long time ago. I do support the democratic effort to force those who lease oil and gas reserves to actually use them.
Also, I don’t like the amount of power the natural gas companies are amassing. But Bush didn’t do nearly enough to stop the solar and wind robberbarrons. When it comes to government support of solar and wind, anything more than zero is too much.
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January 25th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
DV82XL said:
That is a problem with international waters. You can only hurt your own country by putting restrictions on it. Another country can come and overfish them. I guess the one thing you could do is demand that the forign governments will enforce equally strong laws and then if they don’t you could try to put some nasty sanctions on them. Maybe ban their seafood being imported to your country, hit their products with tarriffs or just resort to the standard uber-bastardy diplomacy of doing things like forcing their citizens to get expensive visas every time they travel in your country, deny them overflight rights, frieze their assets, expel their diplomats or whatever else has to be done. Hopefully just banning their seafood or other food imports would be enough.
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January 25th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Q said:
Well they could also harass the ships, ram them, try to force them away and otherwise bother them at sea. According to Greenpeace and Sea Shepard, that’s a completely legitimate way to settle disputes about ecological policies
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January 25th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
drbuzz0 said:
That’s the way alright, except when it’s done by an armed, flagged, military vessel, it’s called ‘law enforcement’ and it’s absolutely legitimate.
Countervail tariffs never are a good thing.
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January 26th, 2009 at 12:41 am
DV82XL said:
Well that depends. When It’s in teritorial waters or if their is evidence of the country’s laws being violated (such as by smugglers headed to or from a country) or if there is international crimes of some type being conducted, such as piracy, then it’s legitimate.
However, when it’s just an arbitrary decision to harass a ship because you don’t like their activities for some personal reason, then it’s not legitimate. If a sovereign navy were to go around attacking ships based on their accusation that the they were doing something bad like overfishing, then that would be an act of war.
You can’t go around fowling the props of whaling ships to save the whales any more than you could do that to Tuna ships to stop them murdering the Tuna.
Now as for ships in International waters: I don’t think that the US or Canada or other countries have much of a leg to stand on in terms of stopping overfishing, EXCEPT in cases where there is a standing treaty that verifies the right to enforce it in international waters. Either a treaty with the ship’s registry nation or a general common law or UN convention. Other wise, if the US decides that they want less fishing of Atlantic cod in the North Atlantic and a Belgian ship decides to do it anyway, I don’t know that there’s much that can be done unless the EU or Belgium were to agree to enforcement.
Usually navies don’t go around acting like law enforcement in international waters unless someone does something ***really*** egregious, such as endangering the safety of another vessel.
Anyway, I guess one could always just use force but that’s really a bad can of worms to open.
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January 26th, 2009 at 1:03 am
This is the dumbest thing I have ever seen. Do they really think that by making cartoons of fish that are all glossy/OSX looking and then adding eyelashes to the fish and calling them “sea kittens’ changes anything. I love their story about how the catfish loves to cuddle in little holes – oh but she’ll bite your hand and latch on if you stick it in there and she’s so stupid that she won’t let go when you pull her out of the water.
They can’t change the fact that fish are not smart or at least most are not smart. In nature most animals are not any smarter than they need to be to get some benefit and for fish that means they are not thinking beings or even close. These are not chimps or monkeys or dogs or pigs. You can’t teach a fish sign language and how to count to ten and fish don’t get attached to things or learn how to solve puzzles.
They’re just stupid, delicious little things to put hooks into.
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January 26th, 2009 at 1:06 am
drbuzz0 said:
Well that is exactly the situation I was thinking of. When agreements have been signed and these ships are in violation, I think (someone correct me if I am not) that they can be interdicted in international waters, and placed under arrest. I know there was some actions like this at the start of the cod fishing ban, and the Canadian Navy sent out ships to cut the trawl-lines of offending boats. I assume they were doing so under good maritime law.
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:09 am
Q said:
Well I guess you don’t like Obama’s energy policy so far, he’s got 20B more for renewables in the stimulus bill :-\. I was hoping I’d found someone to back me up.
Anyway, aren’t some fish pretty intelligent? Dolphins and such at Seaworld can be trained to do tricks, sharks as well. But yeah probably most fish are not that smart, especially ones people eat.
[b]They’re just stupid, delicious little things to put hooks into.[/b]
That sounds pretty callous, actually the wrong tone. I think it’d be a good idea to show a bit more sensitivity than that.
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:29 am
If PETA had any brains to speak off they would mention the fact that some 90% of all big fish in the ocean are gone since the 1950’s.
We treated it like a war and went after them with GPS, fish finding sonar and nets so spectacular it takes several tens of tonnes of tension to tow them at just a few knots when deployed. When that wasn’t enough to keep fishing profitable we subsidized the hell out of their fuel so they could keep going after ever diminishing quantities of fish. The way we’ve managed ocean fisheries is deplorable.
Currently most of these predatory fish that we like to eat requires huge quantities of fish meal as feed if you want to farm them; if I had any say in the matter I’d fasttrack GM plants capable of serving as fish food or and/or GM fish capable of being fed on a plant diet. I’d create a system of property rights for any fishery not in international waters, such that licences to fish x quantity of fish are auctioned of to the highest bidder and the total quantity of fish allowed to be catched is slightly less than what the fishery can sustain so that it may recover(and illegal fishing doesn’t push it above the limit); fisheries suffer tremendously from the tragedy of the commons.
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:33 am
Bruce, neither dolphins nor whales are fish. They are mammals and evolved to walk on land; unlike us they evolved back into water-dwelling creatures at some point. If I remember correctly, hippos and whales are quite closely related and share a common ancestor; dolphins branched of earlier.
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:37 am
“That sounds pretty callous, actually the wrong tone. I think it’d be a good idea to show a bit more sensitivity than that.”
It’s factually correct. They are thoroughly stupid and they sure are delicious.
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January 26th, 2009 at 4:40 am
Speaking of fish, what do you think about some environmentalists and Democrats plans in the northeast to start breaching hydroelectric dams? I remember it was an issue Bush played up during the 2000 campaign and Gore never said he would be against breaching them.
http://www.bluefish.org/xbabbitt.htm
I have mixed feelings, I like the idea of helping the fish population, but on the other hand these dams do provide a good amount of hydroelectric power.
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January 26th, 2009 at 10:53 am
On the other hand, maybe this means kittens are a tasty source of protein… just like puppies!
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January 26th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Sea kitties? Well, the Vietnamese would have not much trouble with that… maybe they can get in on a nascent industry!
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January 26th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Bruce said:
Some sharks are thought to be somewhat higher on the cognitive scale than other fish, although it’s all relative. Trout and tuna and any fish that are of the “school” variety tend to be only slightly smarter than a box of rocks. I’m not aware of sharks being trained to do ‘tricks’ though.
By the way, dolphins are mammals and roughly as related to fish as humans. Isn’t calling a dolphin or whale a fish one of the quintessential things for a person to say to prove they have no idea what they are talking about? I mean it’s up there with calling the earth flat or that stars are tiny or that meteors are stars falling to earth or something.
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Trust me, go to seaworld, they train sharks to do tricks. I know, dolphins are mammals, I was just thinking the Greenpeace campaign meant the things that live in the ocean, in general. My thought was, intelligence may indeed depend on where they live, so if Dolphins are intelligent and live in the ocean, there might be other intelligent things in the ocean besides.
I mean birds are not mammals, but some of them are pretty intelligent and they have amazing location memory, as well as being able to speak understandable words. I know they don’t actually understand English of course. But even if fish are not intelligent, I think we should still take a second look at some of these dams we constructed, and see if they are really better to leave them there or allow the river to flow naturally. On the other hand, it is green house free gasses, and according to you guys replacing those dams with solar and wind is hard (or, as you claim, impossible) so I have mixed feelings.
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January 26th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Oh I mean PETA not Greenpeace.
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January 26th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I agree with you that PETA are idiots and this is just stupid beyond belief.
However I would disagree that fish are not that smart. My wife and I keep tropical marine fish and seahorses and they exhibit some surprisingly intelligent behaviors.
We did have a sea horse that would lie on the bottom of the tank looking dreadfully ill when she was hungry so people would come over to the tank to check on her and then we would start doing the “food dance”.
We also used to have a Coris Wrasse that figured out that if he followed our sleeper goby around (a fish that sifts the sand on the bottom of its enviroment for food. We used to bury his food in the gravel at the bottom of the tank so he could sift and enjoy it) he would start sifting over food and then would chase the goby off and dig the food up himself. Of course this same wrasse used to take prawns out of our moray eels mouth (and would have these funny v-shaped bite marks periodically) so maybe not so bright.
And our fish do tend to have names
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January 26th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Jason said:
Well, like I said, fish are an enormously diverse group of organisms and there are some that show some pretty descent intelligence. In general, those which are individual or in small social groups tend to be smarter than those that swim in schools. Heard animals tend to be pretty individually dumb because in such species individual intelligence can actually be more of a problem than a help. They just need to follow the group. There is ’swarm intelligence’ in the larger group, but that’s different.
But by and large, I don’t tend to see fish as being the smartest animals. It all depends on context, but all things considered, ‘intelligent’ in the greater animal kingdom tends to be considered high in groups like Primates, some marine mammals, pigs, a few species of birds etc.
I suppose it depends on your standard. But when I think “Intelligent Animal” I think of a chimp that can be taught to do basic math.
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January 26th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Bruce said:
First off hydro isn’t particularly green, nor is it necessarily greenhouse gas free, although the latter is more true in the tropics than in North America. Big hydro projects can do massive damage to the environment in their immediate area, and damage the hydrology of an area several times larger.
The only thing that hydro has going for it is that to date it is the only form of renewable energy that can assume base-load, and who’s output is reasonably predictable. However the usual issues of transmission from currently unexploited systems (mostly in the Far North) that plague other renewables are in force as well.
Knocking down dams wholesale is probably not posible even if electric power can be had from other sources, as most if not all major hydro projects are also water-management facilities, and that function will not go away.
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January 26th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
DV82XL said:
Well, that depends on the project. Hydroelectric can be damaging, but it can also be part of a well planned water management project to reduce flooding dangers, improve navigation, increase irrigation etc etc. It all depends on how well planned it is and whether the enviornmental damage is understood and considered acceptable given the benefits.
Now as for greenhouse emissions, this again depends on the circumstances. If it’s an issue of filling a desert canyon like with the hoover dam, then there’s not much biomass there to rot. you’re right that the tropics are what have the real problem. The other thing is that once a hydro plant is built, the damage in terms of causing biomass to rot is done and so taking down the dam solves nothing and could make the problem worse.
Existing hydroelectric facilities are basically greenhouse gas free, since most have been around for decades. And at this point one has to wonder whether the damage of removing them would be greater than continuing to use them. Take down a dam that has been there for decades and you’re exposing a huge muddy flat and killing all the underwater life that has come to the area over the time the dam was there.
I’m generally all for the use of hydroelectric to the maximum extent it can be while maintaining reasonable enviornmental impacts and economics.
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January 27th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Sung Li Kim said:
Treating animals like pets and elevating them to human levels of concern is something that is basically reserved for societies where the people live well enough to not have to worry about whether they or their animal gets food and such. The industrial west is where poodles have their own beds and cats are given radiation therapy for cancer. I’m sure most of the working stiffs in harder up places would laugh even harder at this whole idea.
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January 27th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Fish may be dumb, but those octo**** sure are smart slugs.
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January 27th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Damn, a perfact good pun spoiled by the filter. ho hum. Who knew that octopuusies (sp) were so offensive?
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January 29th, 2009 at 3:19 am
I thought I’d put some water into a shallow container and let some Sea Kittens play with some feline kittens. I’ll just go back now and see how they’re all getting along.
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January 29th, 2009 at 3:21 am
Now that’s odd. I can’t find the Sea Kittens anywhere, and not one of those cats is touching their food.
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