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Some of my earliest memories encompass mother opening a can of tuna fish, adding diced hardboiled egg, minced onion, celery, and Hellman's Real Mayonnaise, spreading it between two slices of Wonderbread, and presenting it as a meal. Little did I suspect that I was being fed a fish masquerading under an assumed name. Little did I suspect that I was an accomplice in the disinterested murder of tens of thousands of dolphins, each as cute, lovable and intelligent as Flipper. Little did I suspect that in my maturity the bountiful completeness of knowledge would present these irrefutable facts before me, and I could not care less.
Tuna is a non-existent fish. Tunney are those carnivorous silvery hydrodynamic piscine torpedoes cutting through the ocean, voraciously consuming anything with circulating blood presented before their well-toothed mouths. Tuna was the guttural whine emitted by illiterate workers of the lowest class, unable to achieve employment except as gutters and canners of stinking raw fish. Those immaculate cans perched so innocently upon the supermarket shelves contain generous portions of the ulcerated hands, reeking ammonaceous fishy stench, and uncouth lives of those who prepare our food. Would that there be no shortage of individuals too proud to accept public charity and so utterly unskilled that they would do this for us, or they themselves starve.
Dolphins are credited with near-human intelligence. This superlative cognitive prowess manifests itself as a mammal too stupid to avoid drowning in tuna nets by the tens of thousands. You might think, fellow cogitating mammal, that simple observation of an entire community of their brethren squealing their death throes might spark some meager light within the brains of those dolphins remaining, perhaps enlightening them as to the personal advisability of moving out when the tuna boats move in. We see those cute cetaceans making prodigious leaps into the air at Marine World in trade for a dead squid. Is survival insufficient motivation for a leap out of the net in the wild?
Rather than condemning tuna fishermen for killing our cute and cuddly large-brained aquatic evolutionary brethren, we should celebrate their endeavor in weeding out the most insufferably stupid among the dolphins, enhancing those remaining via selection pressure, facilitating their evolution into an animal capable of self-preservation. I suspect, given a few tens of thousands of examples each year for the past two decades or more, that the oversize cranial capacity of porpoises is devoted to anything but abstract reasoning or self-awareness. That tuna fishermen have no use for the mammalian carcasses and throw them overboard is indicative of their motives - businessmen do not devote investment and labor to valueless endeavors. The dead dolphins are a nuisance...
...But a useful nuisance, since a basic precept of business administration is that when presented with a bushel of lemons, make lemonade. As long as labor and resources must be devoted to hauling those dead dolphin carcasses aboard and then throwing them back, would it not be delightful if the tuna-consuming public paid the businessmen not to do that? Money could be made harvesting fish, and more money could be made not harvesting mammals. Why stop there? Much, much more money could be made not harvesting mammals, since the American social and political agenda is being deliciously corrupted beyond the mightiest dreams of 19th century marvels like Boss Tweed or the robber barons of steel, petroleum, finance, and the railroads. Have the public pay for something they do not wish to receive! The Mafia calls this "protection," The government calls this being "kinder and gentler" - a user fee on life, as it were.
There is an evident robustness in some species that defies extermination, vast depths of reproductive prowess and aggressive determination to prosper, a willingness to fight to the death to secure further space and resources for even more reproduction and further dominance. Englishmen have been hunting foxes for centuries, intensifying their efforts when rabies epizootics ravage the land. There is no shortage of ever keener and more cunning foxes in England. American farmers and herders have been poisoning, shooting and trapping coyotes for a hundred years, and there is no shortage of ever tougher and more intelligent coyotes. Even a herbivorous ambulatory hors d'oevre like the rabbit, a quick snack for hawk, snake, dingo and just about anything else that eats meat in the wild, has proven impossible to eradicate or even control, in Australia. Consider the Welfare rolls, publicly administered charity defining an ecological and political niche occupied by possessors of those same squinty eyes and bared fangs.
I am quite willing to pay not a single copper plated zinc penny extra to insure that every can of tuna I consume was not caught by a fishing boat whose crew and management do not care in the slightest what they haul in with their nets along with the cash fish. I specifically look for those morally and ecologically sound cans of tunney, and studiously regard them with ignominy. When I am charged for the privilege of adhering to a hackneyed morality, forced to involuntarily contribute to the monetary splendor of venal businessmen who, incapable of increasing their profits through the sale of goods resort to a protection racket, then the producers of dolphin-laced tuna will thrive upon my patronage.
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