Member-only story
One afternoon, when I was a boy, I killed a fish. I learned aspects about myself that are difficult to acquire through ordinary activities. Other fish had died at my hands before that afternoon, but I wasn’t fussed about most of them. That one, though, it hurt.
When I was little, my parents taught me to fish. It was almost all I thought about when I was a kid. Sometimes I’d eat the ones I’d catch—brook trout from upstate New York, bass from New England ponds, and bluefish and flounder from its ocean shores.
The steps from catching a fish to serving it on a plate aren’t commonly discussed, but unsurprisingly, it involves killing the fish. It goes without saying that we also kill cows, chickens, pigs, and a lot of things many of us eat. This essay isn’t about vegetarianism, but societally we actively elide the killing part of turning those animals into food.
Fish, though, don’t usually make the ethical cut. We’re still unfazed to see the flopping silvery contents of a fishing net (our future dinners) dumped onto the deck of a trawler when a comparable scene with mammals would be horrifying. So, like most people, I didn’t give it much thought when I learned how to catch, kill, and fillet what I caught.
