I don't even find it hypocritical... I'd be sad too if I couldn't eat the fish... It could have at least died to fit in my belly rather than just dying for no good reason.
I know it's a meme, but is anyone actually sad for the fish? I thought we were terrified about what was happening to our food. If someone autopsied a downed cow and a bunch of toxic plastic shit spilled from their stomachs, we aren't thinking "poor cow ate all that plastic and died." We're worried about our food supply.
I'm sad for the fish because if they're gone I can't eat them, and they can't eat the tasty little fish, and they miss out on all that lovely tasty phytoplankton...
I'm sad for the fish. Imaging being forced into a massive pile of others just like you while being crushed by the weight of them and suffocating to death. It's fucked up
I do have some level of sympathy for the fish but also recognize I'm a little more sympathetic to non-human life than most people. I can't bring myself to kill insects without a good reason (except ticks and mosquito) not even ants. Whenever my parents would cut down a tree on their property I grieve for the life of the trees lost just because my dad fell off one as a kid and has a subconscious hatred for them now (yes he even admitted to me this was the case) I even feel some guilt about cutting grass and mulching the occasional bee.
I've worked a seasonal job giving medical care to dairy cows, once you see just how poorly farmers treat them and how horrific their short lives are its hard not to feel bad for them. Farmers make standard animal cruelty cases look like mild neglect by comparison. The only blessing is that modern cows have been selectively bread to become so docile as to be almost braindead.
I'm cool with eating animals, the cycle of life and all that, but in trade we can at least try to give them decent lives that aren't so fucking awful from birth to death. Like it or not even fish have some level of intelligence and most likely emotional capacity. same with farm animals, trees, mushrooms, insects, and probably even the microorganisms to some degree. To think we are special and the only feeling lifeforms on the planet out o billions just cause the thinky thinky parts of our brain are a little bit bigger than most is just stupid and a very human-centric idea that strokes our own collective ego in a manifest destiny kind of way.
Yes I know I'm wierd but maybe the world needs a few people like me who care a little too much about non-human suffering.
That might just be the weirdest turnaround. You can't hurt a fly, but you're okay with a cow being bolted through the brain because they're a bit tastier than mock meets?
Like, you can't be "sympathetic to animals" if you're paying an industry that mass slaughters them. Especially when you're only paying that out of simple preference. I sure hope you don't find humans tasty, because it sounds like you'll set aside all of your morals for a yummy lunch?
You don't have to feel bad for cutting grass. That's grass its entire evolutionary skitch, albeit naturally with being grazed instead of mechanically cut.
Grass survives cuts extremely well. Most of its mass is below ground. By thriving in areas that are frequently grazed / cut, it outcompetes other plants. Natural meadows without grazers quickly turn into forests. But tree saplings don't survive being eaten, so whenever there are grazers (or human cuts), grass outcompetes trees.
People here are talking about fishes as our food source but what about fishes as a food source for other aquatic life? Or other animals that feed on those marine life? The effects can be far reaching. So the implication of a fish dying from plastic is a bit more complicated than what OP's making it out to be
Any fish that dies from plastic is dying from a method that isn't me eating it. Also, there's lots of fish I don't eat that I'm not cool with dying to plastic. I really like the ocean plants that make all the oxygen I breath too.
It's weird. I don't like most fish, but I really don't have an ethical problem in general with eating fish as long as they were harvested sustainably. Unfortunately, most of the saltwater fish I have enjoyed over the years- shark and swordfish steak, cod, tuna- are not harvested sustainably, so I don't eat them. That pretty much leaves me with farmed trout and catfish, the only two other fish I like. And I just don't feel like it's the same as eating a cow or a chicken. Maybe I don't have any actual scientific basis to go on, but fish are just so different from us and so much more primitive that it just doesn't bother me.