Aquarium Visitors Eat the Animals They Like to Watch
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On Sunday, a group of visitors to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium took part in what can only be described as one of the most morbid lessons in fish appreciation that we’ve heard of.
After aquarium patrons had had their fill of staring at aquatic animals in glass prisons, they were taken to a back room and taught how to cut up and make raw sushi out of the dead cousins of the fish and crabs they’d just oohed and aahed over.
It’s all part of the aquarium’s “Right Bite” program, which aims to teach people that they can continue eating fish as long as it’s not an “overfished” species. What the program fails to teach its students is that all ocean animals, whether bluefin tuna or Dungeness crabs, feel pain when they are drug up from their watery home in a net and forced to suffocate on the deck of a ship. Did they miss the recent study about crabs?
This institution says it “connects people to the living world,” but it actually teaches visitors—including children—that fish are just things: food without feelings. Any way you slice it, that’s just plain wrong.
Written by Karin Bennett
