My question is… dear fish…
whether you identify as British?
Spanish or perhaps Flemish…?

The fish replies:
You who address me as ‘a fish’…?
your question suggests ownership

I see your interest is upon which country’s dish
my heated form should lie
if humans cause my life to die…

…perhaps
in decompressing rapidly
when i am hauled up from the sea.

So many of us,
weight… in net,
compressed…
then split and gutted, each like all the rest.

My corpse sold on… for what money they are able
until i lie upon a dinner table…
and am
eaten before too late…
before my own expiry date…?!

That’s a ‘fishy’ joke! : )
But humour won’t save me…
this hapless denizen of the sea!

As a fish, to you I am
worth more dead… than alive!!!

However –

I don’t want you to pity me
but to take this opportunity

To tell you how it is for us,
deeply affected
by you land-bound populace.

I know, habitually through time,
you ‘humans’ feed on flesh…
like many of us living in the brine.

I am not angry, do not judge…
but wish for you
to realise how bad it is for us…

and it is getting worse!

And you should care – for us, for you…
affected by the chemicals
we eat, our bodies change.
This knowledge is not new…

as you eat us… i grieve to think…
you concentrate
whatever chemicals were in our food and drink.

Water which is thirty per cent more acidic that it used to be
has changed our world
… information kindly shared by Mark Carney*

And we,
just as you humans
would, suffer experientially…
living continuously in/drinking in
water of such high acidity

Water pH affects reproduction rates
… heavy metals concentrate…
so stress increase with falling biodiversity
and worse…

We don’t have ‘plants’ to treat the water in the sea
but we need you to do something… because,
chemically,
it’s become disgusting –
dangerously.

Environmentally our friends the whales… can help,
with carbon capture, eco-balancing – oxygen assist
if doubtful you can check on this…

However they who have been eaten sustainably
on the Faroe Islands for many years
… are no longer considered fit to eat.
The levels of mercury and other heavy metals in their bodies are high enough to be implicated as causal factors
in increasing rates of Parkinson’s disease in humans.

The impact of this on the whales is unknown…
but to imagine they are they completely impervious
…and creatures lower down the ‘food chain’ unaffected
defies your ‘reliance on science’.


Like our bird-friends we become entangled in your fishing nets
and other aspects of your detritus…
Like them, our bellies fill with plastic floating in the sea
… and micro-plastic’s found internally.

Some humans have to manage their food intake, artificially
reducing the size of their stomach to stay alive.
We do not have this difficulty…

…if we swallow plastic and it doesn’t pass through
we may well not survive…
it’s certain that we will not thrive
with the capacity of our stomachs so reduced.

So when you catch us,
cooks note this
your dish will be a mix of food …
non-food chemicals and some plastics!

Speaking for the whales…there has been criticism lately of the behaviour of some of them.
Recently a pod of orcas in the Mediterranean have been head-butting boats sometimes damaging the boats and frightening the noise-making occupants.
The orcas are not built to head-butt solid objects, they may have big headaches after this, but as yet no human has been killed or hurt.

But humans have attacked these orcas… their pod is close to extinction due to human interference.

I’d like to remind you that when you humans first met the whales they were delighted to greet you and were very playful.
In time they realised that meeting you, oftentimes, meant death…

You killed them and used them for food,
as fuel for your lights,
as shapers in corsetry to make the female form more appealing to the male;
… for lubrication, for cosmetics, soaps, vanishes, paints, laquer, perfumes, vitamins, carvings…

Killing followed killing, the whales became wary
… they learned…

Your boats’ propellers have chewed into their bodies, and they sink.

One way or another they have died in great numbers, almost to extinction.

Some fisherman regard them as their enemy… competing for their fish (their fish!)… and kill and mutilate them.

Across the wide oceans the whales who used to sing…
voices travelling half-way around the world,
have to shout loudly to be heard above the shipping noise
(subtle communicative nuances are lost in shouting)

Navigation becomes a nightmare
as extraneous sounds impede interpretation…
poisonous chemicals impact on neural functioning…
untimely deaths of young and old inhibit transmission of knowledge…
and the starlight patterning is occluded by satellites and space junk.

Yet despite all this, such massive provocation
there are as i said, as yet, no human deaths from Orca attacks.

In Australia there have been more shark attacks than usual, and overall seventeen attacks and eight deaths…
One response, typical of humans, is
‘we need to kill them’.

Whilst we are not humans and anthropomorphizing us is unwise,
we are sentient and intelligent, we communicate and feel pain
… please, I beg you, do not react to our behaviour in this way.

It will not help the situation.
Many of us are, with good reason at this time, very disturbed…
we live in these oceans
but you ‘guests’ treat our home as your toilets, larders…
swimming pools…

Building for leisure, trade, or base for future fights
along our shores and in our world,
means noise continues day and night

Hungry to find, and to take out more
disturbing the depths, the crust,
your machinery explores

Pollution follows every entry
that you make into the water
and below the sea

I plead with you,
knowing your desolation in the face of your current crisis of viral infection, and human tendencies to fight over resources,
not to use your energy to fight over who will get the greater share of our bodies…

But to turn your energy instead towards health and survival,
towards of health of the waters that we live in,
the waters that nourish us, that nourish you…

That we may share this earth and it’s waters
Treating our environment and each other
respectfully,

with love,

from what ‘you humans’, ha ha, call

A fish

picture: wikipedia licence creative commons
*(2020 Governor of the bank of England… in his final Reith lecture)

note…some fish are less susceptible to the hazards of marine life.
If you eat us perhaps you’ll seek what’s best…
for, as with plants, when we are penned, kept close in nets,
chemicals are often used to keep us ‘healthiest’
…or maybe not…