Philip Hoare

Not so cold-blooded

Jonathan Balcombe’s disquieting book shows just how intelligent and sentient fish are, and how scandalously we abuse them

The recent furore over a freakshow ice rink in Japan, with hapless fishes embedded beneath the skaters’ feet, was inexplicable to some. The fish were dead already, weren’t they, bought from the market? What’s the difference between eating them and gliding over their artlessly strewn bodies, posed as if in a frozen shoal like the porpoises Virginia Woolf’s Orlando glimpses in an iced-up Thames?

The difference is us. In a world sensitive to every nuance of use and consumption, fishes, like the sea in which most of them swim, are the new frontier. As the queer theorist and Sydney-based academic Elisabeth Probyn notes in her new book, Eating the Ocean (Duke University Press), our modern sensitivities — and the middle-class-driven search for ethically-sourced food — have resulted in a remorseless expansion. We are eating twice the amount of fish now that we were eating in the 1960s; the same period has seen a 50 per cent fall in fish populations.

It is ironic that as the acidifying, warming oceans rise, we look increasingly to their denizens to sustain our unsustainable populations. Probyn writes evocatively of the ‘fork-wavers’ who turn meals into political battlefields, as if our allegiances and all the world’s wrongs were embodied in a mouthful. But if that wasn’t enough, along comes the American scientist and author Jonathan Balcombe to challenge our preconceptions about fishes — to the extent that he declines to employ the collective plural, seeing them as sentient individuals rather than a resource.

When it comes to empathy, fishes have a marketing problem. They’re cold-blooded, seemingly simple creatures, occupying an element that seems far removed from ours. That alien quality, Balcombe intimates, allows us to treat them the way we do. We do not, apparently, shudder at the sight of their gasping bodies thrashing in pain as they suffocate in a net or on the deck of a trawler.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in