The scene takes place in Sifnos, an island in the Aegean Sea in Greece where I have been staying for a few weeks already. While my partner and I are finishing a meal in a restaurant located on the beach of Vathy, three children settle down at the end of a small wooden pier which juts out into the sea in order to clean the fish and a small octopus that the oldest of them has just been fishing. Water up to their knees, knife in hand and smile on their face, they seem happy and also very proud of their catch.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
And I too am happy to capture this scene of great beauty and also of great authenticity. Looking at them, I tell myself that these Greek children are currently far from the virtual and artificial worlds to which they could have access if they decided to connect to the Internet using a smart phone.
The raw reality in which they are immersed, they do not hesitate to manipulate it, I would even say to embrace it using their five senses and all of their bodies.
Feet in the sea, fish in their hands, they seem to merge with this nurturing nature. Thus, contrary to what most of our children might feel, cared for by these digital telephones or tablets with which they are stuffed until they are no longer thirsty, there is no disgust among these young Greeks in the face of what is living, organic, even viscous, the example of this little octopus that the youngest of the three does not hesitate to handle cheerfully.
After some hesitation, my partner and I finally went to join them in the sea to talk to them, take a closer look at their catches and take pictures of them. When, naively, we asked them what they were going to do with all these fish, looking at us as if our question was a little stupid, it was without hesitation and in a laconic way that they answered us: eat them !
The Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation
The scene I have just described took place barely two days before I became aware of the Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation published in The duty from October 41. Besides, if I had been asked, perhaps I could have signed this declaration. Like all of the signatories, I recognize that animals are not objects, that they are sensitive and conscious beings who feel emotions. It also goes without saying to me that we must radically review our attitude towards them. I am obviously thinking of our ways of raising them, exploiting them and above all killing them. What happens in animal “factories” and slaughterhouses is completely unworthy for the animals, but especially for the representatives of the human species.
“It seems to me, in fact, that if I am obliged to do no harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a reasonable being than because he is a sensitive being; quality which, being common to beast and man, must at least give one the right not to be unnecessarily mistreated by the other”, wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1755 in his Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men ; passage about which I told my students that it should appear in gold letters above the door of all humane societies.
However, I am not sure, unlike the signatories of the Montreal Declaration, whether it is by relying on the notions of fair and unfair, good and bad, as well as on a strongly moralizing and anti-speciesist discourse binding who wants to go so far as to ban fishing, that we will succeed in advancing the animal cause among the population. As Rousseau pointed out in his Speech, it is not only by counting on reasoning reason that we will come to take the welfare of animals into consideration, but rather by counting also and above all on what he called the feeling of pity, commiseration , or empathy as we would say today; feeling that naturally pushes us to identify with the other, to soak up their distress before coming to their aid.
When I shared the photo that I described at the beginning of this text on Facebook, an Internet user, in a tone that I guessed moralizing, asked me if this killing of fish was for survival or for pleasure. ; implying that the first option was acceptable and the second completely reprehensible. For both, I answered him and especially for Life! These people live on an island, the sea represents an important food resource.
We who grew up in large metropolises and in sanitized, sterilized and cut off spaces from nature, are we going to begin to reproach them or even to forbid them to indulge in activities such as fishing, but also hunting and raising goats or sheep for food?
Try preaching this kind of virtuous discourse to farmers in Quebec or fishermen in the Maritimes. Like my three young fishermen at the start, it is to bet that they too will look at you with a doubtful eye…
In the same way that gender theory by its excesses has been of no help for the advancement of women’s rights, I fear that the anti-speciesist discourse on which the signatories of the Montreal Declaration on the animal exploitation will not succeed, through its restrictive approach and its moralizing gaze, in advancing the animal cause in the population in general and even less among those who, firmly anchored on the floor of the cows, are often confronted with a reality demanding and sometimes with survival problems.