Pike Place Fish Market Fishmongers Under Fire From PETA
PETA is protesting one of the planned entertainments at an upcoming national veterinarians conference in Seattle. The vets asked the Pike Place Fish Market's fishmongers to demonstrate their fish throwing skills. The fishmongers do exhibitions which replicate their daily routine of throwing purchased fish to one another in a showy routine. The purchased fish is thrown to the other fishmonger who wraps the fish for the customer. We've seen it the performances: the fishmongers never seem to drop them and the fish are already dead. But PETA says the practice celebrates cruelty to animals and wants it stopped.
Asserting that the practice of lobbing fish above the heads of patrons and tourists at the market and other venues is disrespectful to creatures that already have gone through a lot, an animal rights group is protesting plans to stage a flying-fish exhibition at an upcoming national veterinarians conference in Seattle.
Ultimately, they would like to see the practice banned at the fish market too. They argue that tourists would not be nearly so eager to snap photos if dead kittens or gutted lambs were sailing over their heads.
"Killing animals so you can toss their bodies around for amusement is just twisted," said Ashley Byrne, senior campaigner for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Washington, D.C.
"And it particularly sends a terrible message to the public when vets call it fun to toss around the corpses of animals. If anyone should be promoting compassion and not callousness toward animals, it should be vets."
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Jeremy Ridgway, one of the managers at the market, said that he has done fish shows for the ministry of manpower in Singapore, for schoolchildren in Oklahoma and at countless other venues.
"People get excited about it. They get to hold a fish; they get to touch it. A lot of people have never held a salmon before. In Oklahoma, they don't have wild fish, unless you count catfish," he said.
He said fishmongers are bewildered at the notion that their toss -- which they describe as merely the quickest way of getting fish from display cases to the counter -- shows any lack of reverence for a creature that is, after all, their livelihood.
"I mean, the fish are dead," Ridgway said. "The thing is, we're not laughing and making fun of them. . . . It's just Point A to Point B. That's why we do it."
"Two crabs!" somebody yells, and the smart ones in the crowd quickly duck.
In a letter to the veterinarian association, PETA Director Sarah King said the flying fish demonstration represents callous disregard for the suffering the creatures undergo before they come to the table.
"There is more than enough scientific evidence to prove that fish feel pain and that they do not die well at the hands of the fishing industry," she said, citing numerous studies that show fish have intelligence as well as sophisticated social structures.
W. Ron DeHaven, the CEO of the American Veterinary Medical Association says the group does not want to do anything that is disrespectful of animals, but sees no problem with the throwing of dead fish. To compromise, he offered to have the fishmongers throw rubber fish which the fishmongers agreed to do, although they couldn't see the point in it. In an informal poll taken by The L.A. Times at the Pike Place Market, most people sided with the fishmongers. One woman pointed out that throwing a fish isn't any more disrespectful than eating a fish.
