Lets not make war here, animal welfare is something most of us have looked at.
But surely PETA is pulling our leg?
Calling fish sea kittens we just have to ask how can anyone take them seriously?
I am forever at war with political correctness, it is a blanket thrown over truth to try to hide it.
But this is madness, never again will I bother with this group.
If the thread gets into print lets keep it calm.

Why should it matter how you call them? a fish is a fish is a fish, and it is simply wrong to take its life, just as it is wrong to kill any other form of life (so far as it does not threaten to your own life).

As for PETA, I don't understand what possibly you have against this nice organization that displays for us beautiful naked young ladies in cages - enjoy it while you can!

Belly

I don't think PETA is serious about a name change. The sea kitten idea is purely a gimmick to catch our atttention and get us thinking about the animal cruelty entailed in fishing.

It's certainly caught our attention, but as for its real message cutting through, I have my doubts. Its cause hasn't been helped by the general attitude of ridicule with which it's been reported in the media.

I know fishing is very much part of our recreational culture but it is cruel. I think it really is time to consider the pain suffered by a fish as it's reeled in with a hook embedded in its gullet, while we beam with pleasure at our own cleverness and enjoy bonding with friends and family in the great outdoors.

I've seen it suggested, quite plausibly too I think, that the timing of this story hints at a deliberate beat-up, put out into the media by the Opposition, the National Party or the farming lobby - in an effort to discredit PETA just as it's achieving great success with its anti-Mulesing campaign.

Grass Kittens.

Yes.. we must STOP the merciless slaughter of the many vulnerable and innocent grasses and other forms of life which grow in the ground...

ITS GENOCIDE! How DARE people interrupt the pleasant and happy lives of various plants and other things happily growing in mother earth!

If people want food.. then let them eat what science can produde through it's use of chemicals.. after all.. we are like 90% water no?

We all know water doesn't have a sensory system.. and the various other chemicals which make up our physical bodies can easily be synthesized and placed in a little pill we can all consume each day.

NO MORE PLANT MURDER!

VEGETARIANISM IS MURRRRRRDER...

Polycarp,

Your claim that "vegetarianism is murder" is inaccurate - what you probably meant is that eating plants is murder: vegetarianism is not about what one eats, but merely about what one avoids eating, eg. corpses of dead animals.

Now whether chopping grasses is murder or not is an open question: we cannot answer it without the subjective experience of being grass ourselves, otherwise we can only speculate. Let me present here just one such speculation, one possible model:

We have plenty of evidence that mammals have feelings. They can be in great pain when their own body is injured. They can also have pain when a close friend/relative is hurt.

We do not have similar evidence about individual insects. Yet insects seem to care about the fate of their swarm. Insects tend to behave quite like our own body cells, caring not for themselves, but for a greater whole. Killing an ant is therefore akin to wounding an individual rather than killing him/her.

When we get down to plants, especially those that can split and break off into shoots rather than procreating distinctly as animals do, the possibility of individual pain seems to be even more remote. It is still likely that plants feel or care about something, but that is probably an even greater whole - maybe their whole species rather than an individual stem. If this is the case, then plucking a plant is relatively just a minor injury (so long as we do not cause extensive damage to a significant proportion of a particular plant species).

Accordingly, it is a matter of degree: while it is ideally best to not injure anything, causing a minor injury is better than causing a major one, which is still better than murdering a conscious individual.

Angels do not damage plants (some even claim that there is a special angel in charge of each plant species - I haven't seen any, so I cannot comment). I am not an angel, but at least I don't need to give up on morality altogether and be counted amongst the worst of humans.

I fish, well I once did, work and the death of my fishing mate have seen me only dream about fishing.
But the sea is one of humanity's biggest food sources, it always will be.
sea kittens, come it is madness, funny but mad.
PETA let sheep die a horrible death, camp outside fast food chains,
But reality has a part to play in life we must eat.
PETA are a huge joke fish and sea life is the only food for much of the world.