Nothing was more badass than that Goldfinger show. My best friend and I loved to go to punk rock shows, all the time. We were the coolest. There was a video playing at the merch stand of a massive pig hung upside down by their leg, defenseless against the man who cut straight down their throat. I went up there to, like, I don’t know, look at band stickers and all of a sudden came to face-to-face with this being fighting for their very life. It was absolutely visceral, unfair, heartbreaking, traumatizing. Had I not seen that I don’t know what my life would look like today.
Representation is big.
Let me share another story, just the other day, with my bestie. So, we’re from the Ocean State and it stands to reason that seafood is a big part of our everyday. We have market price, fresh day’s catch options on menus—It’s a whole culture, right? Well, the other day I was talking to my beautiful friend when she said she was going to go out and buy herself a dinner because this was the last night for the ten-dollar baked scrod sale and it’s just so good.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Once you put a price on a life, that life no longer matters. What’s represented here? The teacher in me would first ask,
“Is there an animal in this story?” Well, yes, there is! Two, in fact! (but we can just keep it to the non-human one.)
“Okay, great! What kind of animal is it?” It’s a fish!
“Good! What do we know about fish?” They’re oviparous, they breathe through their gills, they live in the water, they have scales.
“Great! Now, what do we know about this fish?” It’s on sale for ten dollars, is baked, and is so good.
As a teacher, I would say there’s a fundamental flaw in the way we educate about animals. The advent of emotional intelligence has been a great boon for mental health in the classroom. Talk about getting our own house in order first…I don’t think it has to be this way. Okay, we’re coming in late to the game when it comes to teaching kids about our feelings and how to live with them, but that doesn’t mean we have to restrict this education just to humans. Why don’t we make it about the feelings?
The best things in life are free, right? From Jeff Bezos to Joe Schmo, (the jury’s still out on Zuckerberg) we all have feelings and they’re priceless. (Okay, Mark, you can play, too. I don’t want to hurt your feelings) If we focus on the feelings rather than us, I promise you that at least one of my students will say that animals have feelings, too. Kids are the absolute fans and heroes of animals, and we trick them right out of those very noble, innate feelings.
So, this scrod. Who even knows what a scrod looks like when it has its eyes, a mouth, fins, and is still breathing? I sure as hell don’t, so I’m gonna look them up right now.
…
Okay, right before pressing “Enter” I was brought right back to when I was taking care of Sweetie, a pigeon we took in from the rain one night as they were hiding under a car. During the days that followed, I’d look up how the hell to take care of a pigeon, like, “How to clean a pigeon,” for example, just to find images of hunters cleaning a pigeon they’d killed, how to clean their cage, and of course, how to clean a little pigeon squab’s face (a pigeon chick is called a squab, so I learned during this adventure). Little Sweetie passed away from Paramixovirus, which is probably why they were kicked out of the nest so young. It was a heartbreaking loss because as their name indicates, they were just the sweetest thing. I had set up a nest for them in the bathroom sink to give them space to learn to fly…Wow! What a tangent. I don’t think I’d ever written about little Sweetie, so thank you for indulging me.
Anyway, let’s see what this scrod search has come up with…
As we can see, I just put in the word “scrod” and ONE picture came up of the fish while living.
My second search: “Facts about scrod.” Found this lil’ doozy:
“Scrod is a generic term which is used to refer to fresh whitefish which has been split and boned before sale. The term “scrod” is often seen in the area of New England, where people usually take it to mean “catch of the day.” Rather than referring to a specific fish, scrod can be any number of species, prepared in any number of ways.” -(https://www.allthingsnature.org/what-is-scrod.htm)
Rough and my bad. So we don’t even know what kind of fish we’re looking at in that picture. I’m a thirty-five-year-old New Englander and I had no idea that scrod was a blanket term for white fish. Maybe because I wasn’t all too into seafood, whatever, no excuse other than ignorance, never cared enough to learn. Now I understand why all these plates of scrod body appeared. I want to keep going with this little experiment. Why don’t we look up a specific white fish? Cod, a cornerstone of any good New Englander’s vocabulary.
Okay, progress. The first three images are photos of cod swimming! We have twelve images we’re looking at here. One-third of them are images of them swimming and just being cod. Two-thirds of them show cod caught by proud-looking people or dead. Let’s do one more search:
Dog:
Okay, we have twelve images of dogs here and all of them are alive and none of them are caught or dead. This extreme difference in representation and perspective of different species is called, “Speciesism,” where animals are seen and consequentially valued differently by humans. What speciesisim fails to take into account is that regardless of what an animal looks like, including us, imagine someone smacks us upside the head. Hair, scale, or tale, that shit’s gonna hurt. A last search in this experiment would be for the not-faint-of heart which could go something like, “Dogs, Yulin, China.” Do it, I dare ya. What do you think you’d see?
This is the massive impact culture has on our relationship with food and animals, two categories that are unfortunately linked in the modern world. Good thing we don’t include ourselves in the “animals” category unless, of course, we’re comparing ourselves to lions or something.
Let's Be Clear 