“Fish don’t moan or scream. They also don’t drop quarts of blood when you cut them open. Perhaps that’s why you hear less about their plight en route to your dinner plate. The number of species of vertebrate and invertebrate animals that we yank out of the oceans and lakes and rivers and fish farms knows no bounds. Their experience is surely surreal - minding their own business as they swim free in a three-dimensional volume of water. The concept of flying does not exist because if they want to ascend from their current depth, they just swim there. That’s their entire world. The only existence they know. Then, all of a sudden, one gets yanked from above and pulled into a parallel universe. Nothing is familiar. The sky, the clouds, the Sun’s warmth beating down. The water’s surface was the edge of their oceanic universe - their cosmic horizon. They’ve never before seen it from the outside. Only from within. Moments later they begin to suffocate, and after they’re tossed into a pile of crushed ice, they freeze to death. Those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones get thrown back into the ocean where they try hard to convince their fish friends of what they experienced. Just another fish tale of an alien abduction.”
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilisation”
This is so beautifully put. So very poignant.
ReplyDeleteNeil deGrasse Tyson has a way of putting things that we consider to be very ordinary, in a sort of a viewing prism & rotating that to show us those totally ordinary things from such extraordinary angles that we never even think possible.
True. In just 220 pages, he gives a concise and proper perspective to virtually all the issues we currently face as human beings. If more people listened to voices like him, our world would be a much better place.
ReplyDeleteIt's not only humans who are the culprits of fishes' demise. Fishes are also a source of food for all the other predators that are out there in the sea. Even if humans don't catch them, their life is not such a happy fairytale as some people assume. A lot of fishes even have to fly out of the water under certain circumstances, so flying is not completely unheard of in the fish world. They have to fight so hard against the bigger predators in the sea. Fishes encounter more hazards in the sea than humans can imagine. A researcher even cannot see the whole picture of their lives.
ReplyDeleteWhile humans tend to humanise so much the real answers lie with the fishes' Creator on why they were sent in the first place and how they are going to die. If we were to humanise everything, human survival would be at stake.
Unless science has a very sound conclusion that fishes are suffering more at the hands of humans than from their natural habitat, there is room to think that they were sent to earth, in the first place, with a natural 'fish' understanding that they would be ultimately hunted and eaten and they are not there just to keep on happily swimming aimlessly in the sea. And there is no reason not to think, that they are well-versed in their fish kingdom about what hazards they are supposed to encounter in the big blue ocean world.
Dear Anon, once you read enogh books & attain the intelligence to comment on an idea by Neil deGrasse Tyson, please come back to comment.
DeleteOnce you are intelligent enough to comment on my comment you too can come back and write a better comment that defies and refutes my comment's logic. It is pathetic how some people do not know how to reply properly and hide their own ignorance of the world behind such a comment.
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