Animals for sale
(Animals for sale: puppies, guinea pigs and rabbits in Nanxun)
Just to warn you, in this piece, I discuss the phenomenon of buying live food. I don’t think it’s too awful, but if you’re a bit squeamish, please get someone else to read you the edited highlights.
There are some aspects of life here which are entirely alien to me, and one that has affected me most is the sale of live animals, often as food. Before you give up hot dogs, I believe that the animals in these pictures are on sale as pets – just out of shot on the left is a bucket of turtles. I don’t want to begin expounding my opinions on the treatment of animals because you have heard it before. I do know that if I had taken them all home, Ying would never let me into the flat. Even if all these animals are given homes today, there will surely be a new cage full tomorrow. This picture was taken in Nanxun on a very hot day and it gives a fair impression of the topic for the rest of this post.
Most supermarkets have a section for the live food, and at first it seemed like a rare novelty to peer into all the glass tanks at the eels and fish, crabs, bullfrogs, turtles, shrimps, lobsters and shellfish in all their different forms and colours. In the UK, the only way to see these is with an expensive ticket to a sea life centre, but now I avoid them. I enjoy eating the odd eel, or I did, but Ying and I were passing through a food hall in a supermarket and saw some live eels. As well as looking very miserable, they were bunched up in a knot on one side of a child’s inflatable paddling pool. We passed them on our way to dinner and when we passed the empty pool afterwards, there they were on the worktop, filleted, sliced up and wok-ready. Now, I’m game for any kind of food – I will try almost anything, but both Ying and are finding eel a complex issue since then. There is something about the combination of paddling pool, sad eels and food that makes a fishy dinner less appealing.
The theory of fish in the supermarket is a good one; keeping the food as fresh as possible before eating, it really makes sense. Generally, I’m not sure that it is such a good deal, simply because a supermarket is not a sea life centre, it is a shop with loud children tapping the glass, trollies shunting the tanks and water and fish stock changing constantly. I don’t want to eat a fish that is hiding in a corner of a small tank looking up at it’s former friend floating upside down on the surface. I am also convinced that there are some places (restaurants, high class markets) where the fish are well maintained and content, but I can only report what I find.
Of course I can’t know where my food comes from here, but it is dead when I get it and sometimes frozen. I can hope that it was killed somewhat humanely and quickly after leaving a pleasant environment – at least it cannot be much worse than what these supermarket fish have to endure before they end up in a bowl.
oooh, fresssssh. pete likes!
but yeah, I think even in high class restaurant or market, they are treated the same. I think the mentality is completely different. They (well, we) see these fishes as just food. However, I do see aquarium fishes in different light. Strange. Must investigate further into the mind.
p.s. can you change it’s to its?