A pickaxe in the face

On puffer fish and seeing eyes

Never mind an animal hero of the week. Today’s newsletter is all about the animals. Except the animals are fishes. Because I don’t think most of us think of fishes as animals. Ask a child what an animal is, and they will describe something furry. Something land-based. Something they can see. They will not describe the remarkable Japanese puffer-fish, which makes an intricate display for its mate out of sand which frankly blows my tiny mind. And I’m using that phrase precisely because the Japanese puffer-fish does have a tiny mind but look, oh look, at what it can do just because it can.

I’m thinking a lot about what we think about fish, for obvious reasons (in case you don’t know, I’m writing a book about them and about the humans who hunt them and the ones who eat them). And I find that frequently, in an attempt to convey the importance of what they are trying to protect, ocean and fish conservationists have to resort to the known. To furriness and land. Like the World Wildlife Campaign’s tuna campaign:

Tuna in tuna farms are killed by being shot in the head. Tuna and other large fish caught by “recreational” fishers are hauled in by a “gaffer,” something like a pickaxe that is driven into their flanks or heads. It is possibly the most cruel form of handle I can think of. As Jonathan Safran Foer wrote, in Eating Animals, “No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face. Nothing could be more obvious or less in need of explanation. Is such concern morally out of place when applied to fish, or are we silly to have such unquestioning concern about dogs? Is the suffering of a drawn-out death something that is cruel to inflict on any animal that can experience it, or just some animals?”

Here is Charles Clover, in The End of the Line, trying to convey the brutality and futility of bottom trawling:

Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net bewteen two immense all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across th eplains of Africa. This fantastical assemblage…would scoop up everything in its way: predators, such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangered herbivores, such as rhoinos and elephants, herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthog and wild dog. Pregnant females would be swept up and carried along, with only the smallest juveniles able to wriggle through the mesh.

Once the sweeping-up had been done, half the species would be dumped and left to rot, useless to the hunters and uselessly hunted. Piles of rotting meat. Think back to those burning mounds of cattle during the BSE epidemic, their charred bones sticking up. It was horrific, but it was accepted.

Read the rest of Clover’s book, and Safran Foer’s, because they are excellent.

It’s a losing battle, getting humans to care about fishes as creatures. Already we are adept at ignoring pigs shoved into gestation crates where they cannot move; keeping female cattle permanently lactating which is as appalling and debilitating a state for cattle as it would be for humans. I read a piece while looking for more heroic animals which was about a dairy farmer who had been rescued by her dog from a furious cow. The dog was the hero. The furious cow was furious because her calf had just been removed. The dairy farmer knew this was the reason for the cow’s aggressivity, but said, “we’d taken her calf but that’s what happens on a dairy farm.”

That’s what happens on a dairy farm. And elsewhere: even if I don’t get into the extreme cruelty of factory farming and livestock transportation, or a system where 95% of poultry and 60% of pigs are raised on factory farms, there is this to think about: what gives us the right to remove children from their mothers just because they are not human?

The answer is the scala natura. It is an old concept devised by humans about humans. Nature is a ladder of creatures of varying abilities, and humans are at the top of it. Therefore humans can have dominion over everything else.

I don’t believe that. Because: Japanese puffer fish.

I’m reading a book called Justice for Animals by Martha Nussbaum. She is an eminent philosopher (her author biography on the jacket takes care to point out that she has won the highest prizes that someone who doesn’t qualify for a Nobel can win), and the book is scholarly but accessible enough for me. There is some playground fighting in it, with dismissals of Kantians and Stockians, but there is also a lot of wisdom about what rights an animal has, and who decides them, and does that extend to animals that only “live in the present moment.” I haven’t got to the chapter about that yet, but what I like about the book already is that it counts fishes as animals. Peter Singer didn’t, in Animal Liberation. Jeremy Bentham didn’t, in his famous footnote about animal suffering which included this:

The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Alongside Justice for Animals, I’m reading Distant Water, a book published in 1983 about the disappearing lifestyle of the North Atlantic deep-sea fisherman, by William W. Warner. I’m reading it because Skipper Tom, who took me out on his bottom trawler in Newlyn, keeps telling me to read it. Really. Regular text messages: HAVE YOU READ IT YET

I’m reading it, Skipper.

I may send him Justice for Animals in return. He is a thoughtful man, but even so, when he asked if I wanted to gut the freshly trawled fish, I said no, it’s still alive and I’m not slicing into a living animal. And he said, with some surprise, “yes, I suppose it is.” Essential cognitive dissonance: he cannot consider fish animals because it would make his job difficult, so they have to be things, along with the starfish who get caught in the trawl and die, their legs squashed and splayed in the net.

10 years ago, I may have taken the knife he offered me. I have always thought I should do things that other people may not choose to or get the chance to do. It’s my job. Such as, go down sewers, use a Chinese street toilet crawling with maggots; visit foul-smelling Indian slums; run away to sea on a container ship. (Some of my intrepidness is more fun than other parts.)

In 2005, I went to India to write about shit, and interviewed some manual scavengers. This is a terrible name for a terrible job: they clean latrines (that are sometimes no more than two bricks for someone to squat on, over a cement floor) and carry the shit on their head. Only people from the Dalit caste — colloquially but illegally known as untouchables — do this job, even though untouchability has been illegal in India for 70 years and manual scavenging is not supposed to happen either. The women I visited would be considered untouchable by most of their village. And this is what happened:

The women talk freely. They are chatty and assertive and pristine. I look at them and try to see the dirt on them and in them, but I can’t. They are elegant and beautiful even when they bend down to pick up the two pieces of cracked tin they use to scoop up the faeces; when they demonstrate how they sweep the filth into the basket; when they lift the basket high with arms glittering with bangles, with con- siderable grace. Their compound is dusty but not dirty, though they are not given soap by their employers – whom they refer to more accurately as their ‘owners’ – and though they are not allowed to get water from the well without permission from an upper caste villager. They offer me a tin beaker of water, and the water is yellow. ‘Look at it,’ says Mukesh, an activist from a local Dalit organization called Navsarjan, who has accompanied me. ‘Look at what they have to drink.’ The beaker presents a quandary. I consider pathogens and faecal-oral contamination pathways, but also that they’ll expect me to refuse to take a drink from an untouchable, because many Indians would. I take a sip and hope for the best, feeling pious and foolish, imagining bugs and worms slipping down into my guts, wreaking havoc.

I did the intrepid thing even though I had once got giardia by drinking from someone’s well for equally socially awkward reasons: I didn’t want to trouble my host to go to the shop to buy bottled water for me, when he and his family drank the well water. I wish I had. Giardia is no fun.

I don’t regret that water, or the sewers, or the slums. I do regret shaking the hand of a genocidal murderer in a Rwandan prison, but I lost my iPhone in the prison and never got it back so, karma. But now I think it is equally intrepid to refuse. No, I don’t want to slice into a living fish and you can’t make me. No, I don’t accept that offensive edit. No, I won’t do that for no money when you are paid to produce and when you are using my time and expertise. No, and no.

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Animal Hero of the Week: Flash, Judy, Metta and Folly

You’re wrong. You haven’t read enough about animals yet.

In 1788, a blind sieve-maker (niche!) named Josef Reisinger (or Riesinger) trained first a Spitz and a poodle to guide him. I can’t find the source material, but his dogs were so good, people didn’t believe he was blind. Of course they weren’t the first service dogs: dogs have helped us since they were wolves.

In the early twentieth century, the concept of a formally trained guide dog started in Germany, when the psychologist Dr Gerhard Stalling as called away from a blind patient and left his dog behind, then returned and noticed that the dog was clearly helping the blind man. He founded a school for guide dogs in Oldenburg, and the idea spread: the schools provided dogs to blind people and ex-servicemen all over Europe. A wealthy American woman, Dorothy Harrison Eustis, took the concept back home and set up a Seeing Eye school (guide dogs in the US are called seeing eye dogs, from the Bible quote “a hearing ear and a seeing eye”).

In the UK, the guide dog association began in a garage in Merseyside. Two women, Rosamund Bond and Muriel Crooke, a German shepherd lover and a German shepherd breeder, corresponded with Dorothy Eustis. The American sent over two trainers, they selected seven German shepherds, and that was it. Four dogs were given to their new owners: Flash, Molly, Judy and Metta.

Today, the most popular breed is a Labrador/Golden Retriever or Labrador/German shepherd cross. Then Labradors, Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds and — yes! — poodles or “curly coat retriever crosses”.

This is a taste of what a dog needs to be good at:

I’m not sure I could do all that.

There are too many stories of guide dogs and how bloody amazing they are. Here’s a good one.

More here. A big cheer for Thai, who always leads his owner to the Cool Dog Gear shop in the shopping centre. What, here? What a coincidence.

And on that note, this Guardian Long Read about coincidence was fascinating.