Ikizukuri seems unreasonably cruel
By
Chronos Tachyon
on June 12, 2007
Ikizukuri being Japanese for "prepared alive". It's a variety of sashimi (raw fish) where essentially the live fish is butchered so quickly that it's not yet dead while it's being eaten.
It's banned in several countries and considered cruel even by many in Japan, but there are apparently some connoisseurs who swear that the flavor is worth it. (Your fish can't get any fresher than live, after all.)
To me, it seems unreasonably cruel to carve something up into cuts of meat without killing it first. Even in nature, most predators kill their prey before eating it.
4
5
44.4% 55.6%
Embed Claim
Make a related claim
Similar claims
- 21-0 Sashimi (sliced raw fish) is often mistakenly referred to as sushi (vinegared rice with toppings).
- 2-5 Sushi doesn't get much better than Taka at 555 5th Ave - San Diego, CA - 92101.
- 42-4 Life is Precious!
- 8-3 Zimbardo was a more ethical psychologist than Milgram.
- 49-5 Knowledge is power, but without ethics, it is harmful
Discussion (6)
Actually, in nature there are many, many predators that don't kill their prey before eating it.
Predators don't care whether something is dead or not; all they care about is whether it can fight back or get away. Their only goal is to subdue prey to the point where it can be safely eaten.
Hyenas, for example, are able to swallow while running. They eat their prey while it's still running away from them. Fascinating and terrifying things, hyenas.
True, there are quite a few predators that eat their prey live but not whole. Sticking to vertebrates, though, most predators generally either attempt a kill (e.g. big cats targeting the carotid artery) or rip through their prey with a powerful bite (e.g. sharks and crocodiles), resulting in a quick death either way. (This is, of course, because the predator doesn't want the prey to struggle, and not due to compassion of any sort.)
None of that, of course, has any bearing when the act is performed by humans and the cruelty is judged by humans. I should've left out the last sentence of the claim's description on those grounds.
Oh, and while it's also unrelated to Ikizukuri's cruelty or lack thereof, there's also the fact that since the fish is live, it's certain that it hasn't been frozen to kill parasites. There are all kinds of fun roundworms that are on the lookout for a cozy new mammalian digestive tract to call home.
I totally agree that it's probably stupid for a person to eat live fish since fish are nasty, filthy creatures full of evilness, but I still don't think it's any more cruel than what happens in nature.
Cruelty would be yanking a fish out of the water, smacking it about the head a few times, letting it suffocate for a while, resubmerging it to let it get some oxygen, and then repeating (I believe this technique is called "airboarding").
Or eating it very slowly over the course of several hours, a tiny bite at a time, returning it to its tank after each bite. That'd be pretty mean.
Or pointing and laughing maniacally at it and calling it names before pulling it out of the tank; that'd be mean too.
Do you cry over craps being put in to boiling water?