s] –adjective | 1. | generous in forgiving an insult or injury; free from petty resentfulness or vindictiveness: to be magnanimous toward one's enemies. |
| 2. | high-minded; noble: a just and magnanimous ruler. |
| 3. | proceeding from or revealing generosity or nobility of mind, character, etc.: a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness. |
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It is amazing to me now that fishing scarcely occurred to me to be unethical until this year, at least strongly enough to feel appalled. Perhaps understandably, as mentioned in class, humans do not connect well with fish because their lives, appearance and functions are so much different from ours, but hiding a hook within food to pull the creatures by their upper lip into an environment in which they cannot breathe? If one does have an ethical stance on the suffering of nonhumans, this might be a prime place to start—where torture itself is the form of recreation. Few interactions with other creatures can claim the same.
Certainly part of it relies on the comfort we have with our own environment—pulling fish into the air brings them into our area, and so we may have difficulty expecting it would be hellish for the creature. However, were the roles reversed, and we were pulled to the depths, we might have a very different opinion about what our environment seems to be, while our fishy counterparts may be watching curiously. As this will probably not happen (with them in the human-fishing role), we must instead imagine, and I think most people can agree that if fish are intelligent, which I think they are, fishing is a bit barbaric, to say the least.
As a kid I remember considering this, but never really knowing how to feel about it. In my teen years I preferred playing around with a net—seeing fish bleed at times, or trying to wrench sharp hooks out of their mouths never sat well with me. But it wasn’t until recent years that it really dawned, empathetically, what kind of experience fishing is from a fish’s point of view. And perhaps that’s how we should approach inter-species relationships, particularly sentient ones: with attempted empathy. It’s the least we can do, I think.
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