"Benign Vanilla" wrote in message
...

"george" wrote in message
news:%iKvd.235018$HA.74721@attbi_s01...
snip

This is EXACTLY what I have been trying to say. Thanks Ruth.

BV.


My point is that we do know. And to suggest that I don't have compassion
for
other creatures is quite insulting and untrue. I would have thought that
you
two would have more sense that this. Please read the article at the
following
link:

http://www.cotrout.org/do_fish_feel_pain.htm


Yet the author sums up the article by saying, "The facts about the
neurological processes that generate pain make it highly unlikely that fish
experience the emotional distress and suffering of pain." So he KNOWS, yet
he only believes it to be unlikely. Can you say cop out boys and girls?

He is saying that as a for public consumption (in scientific terms, it's called
"covering oyur ass" - PETA has been after him because they obviously disagree
with him). I can guarantee that if you were to talk to the man in private, he
would not hesitate to say that they do not fell pain or emotional distress. He
has done more research on fish physiology than just about anyone alive today.
He's the experts' expert.

It's your opinion that fish don't feel pain and can be treated properly by
being tossed on the ground.

It's my opinion that a fish that is so close to death that one has to consider
euthanasia is so far gone that it doesn't matter if it once felt pain or not
(research shows that it doesn't), because no matter how you put it down, you are
doing it and the rest of the pond a favor. It is my opinion that nature just
doesn't give a damn about human emotional responses to death. Death is part of
the natural world. In nature, things die, then life recycles their bodies, and
no amount of our anthropomorphizing it will change that fact. We are, after
all, the only species that bury our dead in caskets (thus taking valuable
recyclable resources out of the natural world for generations to come). What
could be more unnatural than that?


It's the opinion of others that this is
insensitive. If you are troubled by that, that's in you, not us.

BV.

I'm not troubled by the fact that others think my position is insensitive.
That's their problem, not mine. I know who I am, and am comfortable with being
me.