Fishkeeping ethics...

[Canuck AquaTropix]

I searched the forums and to my surprise I didn't find any posts on the ethics of fishkeeping.  I've been in the hobby for just over 20 years and it's something that I've struggled with as I got older.  I'm now in my mid 40's.  I stopped keeping birds a long time ago because birds were born to fly and not to be kept in a cage.  Sometimes I feel the same way about fish. We take them from the wild for our pleasure.  I'd like to hear you arguments with the hopes of someone saying something to make me feel better about keeping fish in captivity. 

[Daniel]

I am very cynical. I don't think fish are different from other things humans do. We do what we like and then come up with reasons on why what do is okay (or not okay). How good the reasons seem are usually correlated to whether you think the thing is okay.

I keep honey bees and lot of people think that is unethical and cruel and unnatural. I don't agree with their reasons, but isn't that just what you would expect from a beekeeper? Naturally, I will think of all the reasons why I should be able to keep bees because that is what I already thought. But the anti-beekeeping people are thoughtful and reasonable people and make a coherent argument.

I am not a big believer in teleology (things are made to serve an ultimate purpose), but then again, of course I wouldn't believe that, right?

Humans are selfish, we do what we want, eat what we like, and if other living things suffer, we justify it somehow. One of my hobbies is botany and I love trees. But I killed almost a hundred trees to clear a space to build my house. I felt bad for about an hour and then gave the okay for loggers to cut the trees. I liked those trees, I have kept the logs even until this day. I look at them sometimes and remember the individual trees that had to die so I could have a house.

I can't say any of this is ethical, it is just what we do.

[Ken Burke]

1 hour ago, Mudkicker said:

I searched the forums and to my surprise I didn't find any posts on the ethics of fishkeeping.  I've been in the hobby for just over 20 years and it's something that I've struggled with as I got older.  I'm now in my mid 40's.  I stopped keeping birds a long time ago because birds were born to fly and not to be kept in a cage.  Sometimes I feel the same way about fish. We take them from the wild for our pleasure.  I'd like to hear you arguments with the hopes of someone saying something to make me feel better about keeping fish in captivity. 

So I agree we need some kind of ethics in fish keeping, but I don’t think the practice of fish keeping is immoral.  As long as you are keeping fish in an appropriately sized tank, and provide for their unique needs for clean water, cover, swim space etc, you are giving them a far better life than in the wild.  Most fish in the industry are commercially bred, not wild caught.  And they bred to bring out colors and fins that would leave them vulnerable in the wild.  
 

just my opinion.  

[Nataku]

I will disagree, we don't need any kind of ethics. Any time ethics get involved, someone will attempt to impose some 'rule' that someone else doesn't agree with. Humans are selfish, Daniel is right about that. We will agree to disagree. It is in our nature.

I'm not in this hobby to have more rules placed upon my life. I can get plenty of that having a job, owning a home, paying taxes, etc. 

[RovingGinger]

Fish in the wild live a more varied life, dominated mostly by eat or be eaten. So do most wild cats, cows, lizards, chickens, etc. For that matter, when you keep a houseplant you’re cutting it off from basically an interconnected plant network - fungi that connects trees and plants and bacteria and send signals to others or even nutrients. 
 

My personal take on it is that manipulating nature and our environment is one of humanity’s core adaptation tactics, for better or for worse. At this point it’s pretty impossible to separate the manipulation from the nature whether it’s natural ecosystems overpowered by invasive species, landscaped changed through human intervention and cultivation, turning trees into houses, grafting a rose or a fruit tree, or buying a fancy goldfish. It’s kind of up to the individual to define a moral compass within some of those complexities. 
 

However, in my experience, my fish are at least as smart (cichlids especially) as my mom’s chickens, and therefore I submit that pescatarians are unfairly biased. 

[TheDukeAnumber1]

@ Mudkicker

Fishkeeping ethics will rest on what your worldview is, whether there exists objective moral truths, whether there exists objective purpose, meaning, and value in the universe. I think at rock bottom this is ultimately a religious question which I beileve we are supposed to stray away from that topic in this forum.

All I will say is it is of great value to know what you believe and why you believe it, and greatly important to live coherently and consistently with your beliefs.

[tolstoy21]

I think too often when people enter these kinds of debates they fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing things like fish, meaning that we regard their ethical treatment by ascribing to the non human entity — in this case a fish — human traits. We imagine a fish to have similar desires to us—humans—in regards to their own treatment, feelings like a want for freedom from captivity, or the want to return home to the wild.  Then we imagine we’re violating there ethics because similar treatment would violate our own basic desires.

Personally I would imagine, and this is just a guess, that their wants probably amount to more lower level instinctual things like being safe from predation, good habitat quality, access to food, a sense of safety, the ability to mate, adequate stimulation from their surroundings.  If I’m supplying that, I feel like my treatment of them is ethical. I have no way to know if I’m right, but if feels reasonable to me.

In the case of captive birds, yes I could see how a cage could degrade their life in terms of their basic needs, flight. But in the same vein, I do hate seeing large fish whose body size is greater than the percentage of free tank space available to swim in.

For me the important ethical considerations come down to environmental sustainability of wild caught fish. But to be honest, I don’t have enough knowledge on the subject to even discuss it.

Like others in this thread have already suggested, these are just my ‘beliefs’. I have no idea if I’m right, but I use these beliefs as my own personal code of conduct.

And as @Daniel suggests, yeah, I’ll agree, these beliefs were probably crafted by me simply to justify something I wanted to do prior to me having the beliefs, meaning the action came first — fishkeeping — and the ethics came second to rationalize and fit the action.  Darn you Daniel, why’d ya have go and undermine my whole moral compass like that! 😀

Edited November 6, 2020 by tolstoy21

[Jeff]

Some of us breed fish, so that less are taken from the wild. And, breeding helps keep the hobby going as well.