"Dolphins are a common by-catch in tuna fisheries, especially in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, as they commonly swim with schools of yellowfin tuna. The dolphins, who swim closer to the surface than tuna, may be used as an indicator of tuna presence. Labeling was originally intended to discourage fishing boats from netting dolphins with tuna.
The tuna fishery in the Eastern Tropical Pacific is the only fishery that deliberately targets, chases, and nets dolphins, resulting in estimates of 6-7million dolphins dying in tuna nets since the practice was introduced in the late 1950s, the largest directed kill of dolphins on Earth.[9] With the onset of the Dolphin Safe label program, started in the US in 1990 but soon spreading to foreign tuna operations, the deaths of dolphins has decreased considerably, with official counts, based on observer coverage, of around 1,000 dolphins per year.[9] However, research by the US National Marine Fisheries Service has shown that chasing the dolphins causes baby dolphins to fall behind the pod, resulting in a large "cryptic" kill, likely damaging populations of dolphins, as the young starve or are eaten by sharks while the main pod is held by the nets.[10][11] Thus, claims that tuna fishing can continue to chase and net dolphins and not cause harm are not backed by scientific research."
This is not a problem with random by-catch. The issue was the systematic netting of dolphin pods due to their close association with tuna.
As I point out in my longer comment lower down, forbidding dolphin tracking causes much worse problems with random bycatch:
> If you do the math on this (and you don’t have to because the Environmental Justice Foundation already did), you find that one saved dolphin costs 25,824 small tuna, 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks and rays, 1 billfish, 1,193 triggerfish and other small fish, and 0.06 sea turtles.
> You and I can argue about the relative value of dolphins vs. triggerfish all day, but the important take-home message here is that we are protecting animals that are not endangered at the expense of dozens of other species, and some of those other species are endangered.
I completely agree with you but the issue is not so much the problem with dolphins but that an industry can force the removal of labeling that help consumers make (somewhat) informed choices.
The silver lining in this cloud is that the removal of the labels means that it is inappropriate for people concerned about dolphins or the marine environment in general to be eating tuna at all, though, sadly, I don't think that is going to happen as a result of this.
The issue could also be with advocacy and protection-minded lobbying groups petitioning for actions that would have ultimately caused more harm in their second-order effects than the good in their primary goal.
> If you do the math on this (and you don’t have to because the Environmental Justice Foundation already did), you find that one saved dolphin costs 25,824 small tuna, 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks and rays, 1 billfish, 1,193 triggerfish and other small fish, and 0.06 sea turtles.
These numbers aren't consistent with the table, and the link doesn't seem to have the relevant data. According to the numbers in the table, a dolphin costs 138 mahi-mahi. The other numbers become similarly smaller, when comparable.
> You and I can argue about the relative value of dolphins vs. triggerfish all day, but the important take-home message here is that we are protecting animals that are not endangered at the expense of dozens of other species
If that's the important take-home message, it sounds like the writer has already made up his mind about the relative value of dolphins to other species. And it sounds like I disagree with him. I think dolphins are more intelligent than most species, and have more moral worth, and killing hundreds or thousands of other fish to save one dolphin sounds like a potentially good trade.
The writer seems to want to frame this as charismatic versus non-charismatic, but the fact remains that I care about dolphins more than other species, and I don't care that they aren't endangered.
(I'm mostly vegetarian, but even before that, I avoided tuna because I didn't know how much to trust the dolphin-safe label.)
> and some of those other species are endangered.
Which ones, specifically? Mahi-mahi and wahoo aren't, at least. The rest of that list seem to be broad categories with no single conservation status.
Is this a case of "we're protecting a single dolphin at the expense of lots of other non-endangered fish, and also 5% of an endangered turtle"?
> The first thing that popped into your head was probably “ban tuna fishing”, which is a more politically correct way of saying “make it impossible for the world’s poor to have healthy balanced diets”. It’s just not feasible to ban purse seine fishing. If you’re interested in helping by “voting with your wallet”, you can support sustainably-caught tuna, which is caught with a rod and reel and has almost no bycatch, but this method makes tuna so much more expensive that it’s not a large-scale solution.
But that's not factually true. Take your pick of most legumes. They're cheaper, have more than enough protein as well as other nutrients, are more environmentally sustainable and don't require killing sentient creatures...
> Take your pick of most legumes. They're cheaper, have more than enough protein as well as other nutrients, are more environmentally sustainable and don't require killing sentient creatures...
Most legumes have a pretty high carb-to-protein ratio, and are also incomplete proteins. (Also, there's probably no reasonable definition of sentience that includes all animals and excludes all plants.)
> Most legumes have a pretty high carb-to-protein ratio, and are also incomplete proteins.
This is a red herring, based on misinformation about nutrition. It is not hard to fulfill your daily protein needs and get in all your essential amino acids and maintain a healthy calorie intake while eating a diet of legumes, grains, and vegetables. It can be done for a fraction of the price of a omnivore's diet and can be a lot better nutritionally than downing tuna every day (i.e., there's more opportunities for variety).
> there's probably no reasonable definition of sentience that includes all animals and excludes all plants.
There are a few, but it actually is largely irrelevant. If you stop eating animals you also consume less plants. Every time you eat an animal you have to consider that in order to raise that animal it had to eat a lot of plants that you could've been eating instead. Raising animals is massively inefficient energy-wise, which is why our plant consumption goes down when people stop eating meat.
So really there's no need to draw a "sentience line" in the sand. Assuming everything is sentient, vegetarian diets are better for both plants and animals. But even if it were necessary to draw this sort of line, it would make a fair deal of sense to say that anything without a nervous system is at least relatively less likely to be sentient. There are some arguments for plant sentience due to their limited molecular signalling responses to harmful stimuli, but there is definitely a lot less evidence to support that hypothesis than there is to support the hypothesis that tuna are sentient.
> Most legumes have a pretty high carb-to-protein ratio, and are also incomplete proteins.
>> The reason for the bean/grain combo is nutrition and protein. When you combine beans and grains, their different amino acid makeups form to combine complete proteins. They also each contain different nutrients and grains are higher in calories. There's a reason that some grain was always the staple of the local diet, whether wheat, barley, rice, corn or whatever. "Bread is the staff of life."
>> You'll live better on a bean/grain combo than just beans along. Ask the native Americans.
I would guess it's because tuna is a very cheap source of lots of protein: 100g of tuna is 29g protein for a fraction of a buck (canned). I'm pretty sure that's the cheapest source of protein available (in $/g). eggs are not as cheap, and they don't keep anywhere as long as a stack of canned tuna.
In places I've lived recently, canned tuna isn't the cheapest source, though it's cheap-ish. Canned chicken is cheaper in most of the USA. Even fresh or frozen meats can be cheaper, e.g. chicken in the USA, or pork in Denmark. As well as lower-end sausages and other processed meats. Plus, nearly all vegetable sources of protein, like beans or lentils, are cheaper than those.
I would also not suggest canned tuna as a staple protein, because of its high mercury levels. It's okay to eat occasionally, but eating ~10 cans/week as your main source of protein isn't a good idea. The safe consumption quantity for a typical adult is in the range of 2-3 cans per week of chunk-light, or 1 can/week of albacore.
Here in the UK, if you don't mind buying in larger cans, salmon gives you practically the same protein for your money. Example from the most popular supermarket chain:
Not that I want to tell you what to do or not to do in your own kitchen but please be very careful with canned fish from larger cans, use the whole can at once or transfer the contents to another container that you can properly close.
I think lentils, chickpeas, soy and co. are the cheapest protein. In general in Italy canned tuna (granted it's solid and in olive oil) is never cheaper than 10 euro/kg, and can be as expensive as 35 euro/kg. That's more expensive than fresh chicken, pork and many cuts of beef.
Some really good threads on fermented foods have come up recently (1,2,3). In relation to these healthy, cost-effective protein sources, this legume, soy, afaict, needs fermentation before ingestion (0). See # What Soy Products are Good For You?
Hemp seed has 36g of protein per 100g and is a lot cheaper and environmentally more sustainable to produce, contains omega acids in the perfect ratio for humans (but dose not have the same bio-availability), dose not have high levels of mercury (that's more of a problem with farmed fish not wild).
This seems like one optimal protein source, since we could also squeeze out its oil and use it for diesel fuel. Then, Spirulina, can act as another protein source which can also provide bio-available essential fatty acids.
> “ban tuna fishing”, which is a more politically correct way of saying “make it impossible for the world’s poor to have healthy balanced diets”.
This is not true necessarily. More tuna mean less median fishes, and less median fishes eating mean more anchovies and small fishes alive, thus pound for pound, more food for humans. After the overfishing of tuna in europe anchovies collapsed almost at the same time.
Or just cut way down, as a student tuna was pretty much a staple for me, but these days I have made a concious choice to eat it only about once every couple of months.
Well, the endangered species are endangered either because
1. human involvement
2. natural selection
So I don't see that as a valid argument for not protecting dolphins. It's not really their fault.
Also, we consistently overprotect one not endangered animal (humans) at the expense of all other species.
> we consistently overprotect one not endangered animal (humans) at the expense of all other species
This isn't even true. Environmentalists in rich countries have managed to get lions and tigers (and probably crocodiles, but I can't affirm that from personal knowledge) protected despite the objections of the humans living nearby who hate being eaten.
I would expect humans to protect humans. There aren't any hippos out their attempting to preserve humanity. Hippos look after hippos at the expense of all other species. I can't see how we 'overprotect'
Hippos look after hippos at the expense of all other species.
Interesting claim. How do hippos know about the affairs of all other species, let alone the hippos in the next valley? I think you're overanthropomorphising.
The moral worth of an animal is not just a question of whether its species is endangered though. Dolphins seem much more likely to be conscious than the other species you list.
Mmm just for the record if you look at neuroscientific and cognitive science evidence it's actually a pretty safe bet that all of those marine creatures are sentient... intelligence and the capacity to feel are pretty separate.
We can't be absolutely sure that anyone except for ourselves suffer (not even other humans) because of the other minds problem, but essentially all the scientific evidence we have suggests that humans and other creatures are sentient if they have basic nervous systems and begin to display behaviors consistent with suffering.
Some of my sources: Studied neuro and cog sci myself, just chatted last night with a PhD candidate in neuro who agrees with me, have taken classes with the former longstanding editor of Brain and Behavioral Science who I believe would also agree. There are cog sci journals out there dedicated to this stuff.
lmm said conscious, not sentient, and (regardless of the specific definitions of those words) was almost certainly talking about something more than the ability to suffer.
I subscribe to a train of thought that says it's wrong to kill a person; it's okay to kill a cow, but wrong to torture one; and I'm not sure if anything done to a mosquito could count as torture. I think dolphins are around the same level as humans. I think tuna and many other fish are probably between cows and mosquitos, closer to cows, but I haven't read or thought about that one very hard.
Whatever it is that separates cows from humans, also seems to separate cows from dolphins. It's not sentience, according to your definition of the word, but it's what lmm was talking about.
It sounds to me like you've decided that some species matter more than others based on your own arbitrary perceptions rather than rational or empirical reasoning. It's okay to kill a cow but not a dolphin. Why? Is that just because you've taken your own beliefs as ground truth and reasoned your way from there?
Consciousness is poorly defined, so I don't know exactly what you're getting at there, but one definition is sentience. At any rate, I believe it's fair to say that a sentient being can be described as conscious due to their ability to feel and subjectively process experiences.
Why does consciousness matter if you believe they are sentient? Are you perhaps conflating intelligence with consciousness? Do you believe that it matters more when an intelligent animal suffers than it does when a less intelligent animal suffers? Why? Do they not both suffer? Can the same be said for people with low IQs? Their suffering matters less than mine?
How do you reconcile that slaughterhouse conditions are torturous, even the ones that "ethical farmers" use? That we have video footage that indicate the animals know they are going to die and evidence to suggest the entire process is distressing and painful? That the process by which they are "humanely" anaesthetized/killed (e.g., bolt gun) is still by far not the most humane way to kill animals?
How about the fact we have every reason to believe pigs are incredibly intelligent despite the way we treat them (I'm talking Chimpanzee-level intelligence here — http://animalstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...)? What is this "thing" you believe separates them from dolphins?
Are you sure you are not simply working off of your own unchallenged beliefs that you were raised with by your parents and taking those as ground truth?
It sounds like you've decided I'm wrong, and now you're trying to tell me what mistake I've made, without attempting to understand what I actually believe or why I believe it. AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
As such, I'm going to reply, but then I'm done. You're irritating, and I'm not interested in having a prolonged discussion with you.
I'm not conflating consciousness with the ability to suffer, or with intelligence. I don't know exactly what it is. But far as I understand, humans and dolphins and some other species seem to be aware of their own existence, in a way that cows aren't. (The mirror test is one tool we use to try to judge this.) Humans and dolphins are capable of wanting not to die, in a way that cows aren't. That's what makes it wrong to kill humans and dolphins. Meanwhile, humans and dolphins and cows are capable of suffering, in a way that rocks and (I assume) mosquitos aren't. That's what makes it wrong to torture a human or dolphin or cow, and impossible to torture a rock or mosquito.
> How do you reconcile that slaughterhouse conditions are torturous
Reconcile with what? I specifically said it's wrong to torture a cow. I don't like slaughterhouses. I'm mostly vegetarian.
I didn't say anything about pigs, because I don't know where I'd place them. My understanding is that they seem to be somewhere between cows and dolphins, probably closer to cows.
The right answer is that dolphins are important because they are superpredators at the top of the trophic chain, and its effect over the other species is very relevant. Both dolphins and sharks are of similar importance.
The intensional definition [1] is quite large, but thankfully most people have easy access to an extension [1] of the concept. So here is an extensional definition:
Moral worth is the function you run inside your head that says you prefer to let a thousand earthworms die to save one dolphin.
"Dolphins are a common by-catch in tuna fisheries, especially in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, as they commonly swim with schools of yellowfin tuna. The dolphins, who swim closer to the surface than tuna, may be used as an indicator of tuna presence. Labeling was originally intended to discourage fishing boats from netting dolphins with tuna.
The tuna fishery in the Eastern Tropical Pacific is the only fishery that deliberately targets, chases, and nets dolphins, resulting in estimates of 6-7million dolphins dying in tuna nets since the practice was introduced in the late 1950s, the largest directed kill of dolphins on Earth.[9] With the onset of the Dolphin Safe label program, started in the US in 1990 but soon spreading to foreign tuna operations, the deaths of dolphins has decreased considerably, with official counts, based on observer coverage, of around 1,000 dolphins per year.[9] However, research by the US National Marine Fisheries Service has shown that chasing the dolphins causes baby dolphins to fall behind the pod, resulting in a large "cryptic" kill, likely damaging populations of dolphins, as the young starve or are eaten by sharks while the main pod is held by the nets.[10][11] Thus, claims that tuna fishing can continue to chase and net dolphins and not cause harm are not backed by scientific research."
This is not a problem with random by-catch. The issue was the systematic netting of dolphin pods due to their close association with tuna.