In support of our ‘Language Matters’ campaign, which looks at how language is used to influence how we all think about wildlife, we’re delighted to host a guest post from Jamie Newlin. Jamie is a vegan activist based in the US, who sees the last four years as being “a deliberately engineered/stimulated replay of the sixties specifically in order to destroy the momentum of a slowly growing consciousness about environment and consciousness about class warfare by replacing that with identity politics“.

Language Matters: ‘Campaigns’ against the Awesome Sea-life Hoards

Over the last year I’ve been noticing the use of the word “campaign” to describe fishing seasons, as in ‘the tuna “campaign” will start next week’.

How heroic sounding.

Which is the point, isn’t it?

Action, adventure, I can just about hear those trumpets sounding as the ship skips over the bounding main to a future of…

…pulling sea creatures out of the water to suffocate in the air and then be sold to land-based consumers whose sense of self revolves around solicitous propitiation to their stomachs at the cost of… whatever it takes, as long as we don’t call it what it is. Consumption for pleasure at the cost of whatever it takes…as long as a better-than-deserved light is shed on the complicit parties.

In the article here below, a research vessel which is to go out and inform on squid, as in “Hey guys they’re over here, so come on out, kill’em and sell’em” is characterized as starting its “Squid Campaign”. Some might say that this is enlightened resource management: you have to assess in order to set fishing quotas. But quotas are politically influenced, and the politics is influenced by money-making potential, and the money concerns are there because of the appetite for squid, which appetite grows and is encouraged to grow via marketing. The marketing works because of consumer-rationalization.

No one wants a slack market, except the squid, and no one’s asking them…

So the more you look at this whole chain of cause and effect, the less enlightened it looks, and the more it looks like a ceremony, complete with trumpets and drums, followed by extortion. As in “We see what you’ve got, we’ll have some“. In this sense maybe the military overtones of the word “campaign” are appropriate. It is a hostile surveillance effort, in the sense that the survey, and then the fishing, results in the premature end of a large portion of squid.

And yet, the military overtones only ring true if there is a worthy opponent, an also-hostile opposite-party. An opposite-party which is a threat to you and yours. Which, in this case, there isn’t. No kraken-squid will arise from the briny depths to combat the Fabulous Forces of Fishery. No Evil Squid with lasers attached to their heads will be on guard to defend the rest of Squid-dom. They were just down there minding their relatively innocuous squid business, maybe eating, maybe breeding.

And so the term “campaign” begins to look a little puffish. Vainglorious even. I mean, would we sit still for it if someone started talking about the procuring of mutton as a “campaign” against sheep?

Could we withhold laughter? Not yet, but we’re getting close.

And the sad thing is, humans really could do a lot better.

via FIS / Fish Information and Services
03 December, 2020

After its repair in the SPI Astillero floating dock, which required an investment of almost 400 thousand dollars from the 2020 budget of INIDEP, the fishing research vessel Victor Angelescu is preparing to start a new campaign.

Today, Thursday, December 3, the ship is scheduled to set sail to begin the squid evaluation campaign. In particular, the survey, which will have an extension of twenty days, will have as its main objective to determine the abundance of the summer spawning stock in the area between 44 ° and 46 ° 30 ‘S, in the South management unit.

“If all the swabs are good, the ship should leave this Thursday, depending on the weather conditions expected in the area of ​​operations,” said Oscar Padin, the director of INIDEP before the query of this medium.

From the research institute they highlighted that it will be the first time that an investigation is carried out on the squid resource in December, prior to the start of the 2021 season, a fact that has long been claimed from the chambers that operate on the fishery, from where it is always He warned of the difficulty of starting to fish “blindly.”

Historically, the resource was surveyed with two campaigns: February for the southern Patagonian stock and in April for the North Patagonian Buenos Aires stock, although this historical list of data shows some gaps in the years that the campaigns were interrupted for various reasons.

2020 will also be unforgettable in the squid fishery. Landings of almost 170 thousand tons have been declared, 75.8% more than the 96 thousand landed in the 2019 season. Unlike last year, in this harvest the northern management unit had a greater preponderance where the north-Patagonian Buenos Aires stock showed a surprising abundance that allowed to extend the fishing season until the first days of August.

Source: Revista Puerto. Fish Information Service, 03 Dec 2020

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