Swimming round and round in crowded cages, penned tuna become stressed and are duly medicated for it.

This is a far cry from the torture of animals in testing laboratories which animal rights activists infamously oppose.

On the environmental front, this year’s tuna fishing season should never have opened after International Convention on Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) scientists advised against it, and hostilities in Libya made it impossible to monitor it effectively.

This endangered species is so much in the balance that some nature organisations describe eating a blue fin tuna steak as akin to barbecuing panda or devouring a gorilla burger.

It is only a matter of time before we hear who was on the right or wrong side of the law in the court charge by Fish and Fish Co. Ltd that its tuna pen was rammed and human lives endangered on July 17.

Any evidence of illegalities on the part of the tuna fishermen claimed to be held by environmental renegade Sea Shepherd will be held to the light.

So too will video footage taken from the fishing boat and claims that bottles of acid were hurled on deck as the vessel overtook the fishermen in a high-speed ram of the cage with two employees on it. Sea Shepherd’s 62-year-old captain Paul Watson is known as the man who was kicked out of Greenpeace for being too upfront and violent.

Possibly excited into devilry by the piracy offshore, an anonymous cell reared its head three days after the ramming, in the first recorded act of sabotage attributed to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in Malta.

The slashing of a tuna pen in St Paul’s Bay last month follows last summer’s debut appearance of ALF at a peaceful circus protest in Floriana. In an eye-for-an-eye approach, the liberation creed holds that violence allegedly done by capitalist corporations justifies more violence.

Referring to its untraceable emulators as “troops”, ALF is a sorting house with links to cells in different countries, vowing not to rest “until every cage is empty”.

Last month’s self-styled liberators with an aversion to fish on the menu initially credited themselves online with the release of “dozens” of tuna.

This conflicted with the version of the inshore pen owners, Azzopardi Fisheries, who claimed no fish were lost in the incident.

Online links between these groups have a dispersive quality. Monkey wrenching or ‘ecotage’ portals absolve themselves of any responsibility for the actions of their followers and associates.

The front’s website operators claim they themselves do not indulge in any illegal activities, nor do they know anyone who does. Notably, news of the Malta action came to the ALF website via an even more radical direct action portal. This particular one does not hold back from promoting extreme violence in its newsletter, which delights in senseless activities such as destroying signs at fish shops.

Globally, ALF claims it has never physically hurt anyone and condemns all violence, while at the same time failing to consider extreme personal harassment or damage to property to be violent acts. In the US, where there have been many arson attacks by activists, the Federal Bureau of Investigation holds an entirely different view.

The animal rights front has railed against a recently extended US Patriot Act, complaining that it demonises the liberation movement “not just as whacko or extreme, but also as terrorist”.

According to the ALF guidelines, only those who are strict vegetarians or vegans and who inflict economic damage “to those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals” are given the right to regard themselves as part of the animal liberation movement. The vast majority of vegetarians who practise non-violence take exception to this.

The prime motive for a knife attack on the tuna pen becomes suspect when it comes from a quarter chiefly known for its disapproval of eating animals. If, on the other hand, it was carried out by a group which truly considers itself as environmental, then they should drop the violence and come out and declare themselves.

This is unlikely since such groups revel in pouring scorn on mainstream organisations such as Greenpeace and World Wide Fund for Nature which they consider too soft.

Activities of animal rights ex­tremists were declared a form of terrorism after a 2001 scandal at Europe’s largest animal testing laboratory, Huntingdon Life Sciences.

HLS was exposed by activists as a kind of Abu Qraib prison for beagles in a film secretly shot by People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) and aired on British television. Some HLS employees were fired. It was the first time laboratory technicians had been prosecuted for animal cruelty in the UK.

When Peta stopped its protests against the company after threats of legal action, another ‘leaderless resistance’ under the SHAC banner – Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty – sprang up.

HLS finally cracked under the pressure and was forced to relocate to another country for eight years, but has since returned to Britain.

Last October, six animal activists who targeted HLS employees and suppliers over the years were jailed for up to six years after a £4 million police operation to track them down.

In passing sentence the judge commented:

“I expect you will be seen by some as martyrs for a noble cause, but that would be wholly misplaced. You are not going to prison for expressing your beliefs. You are going to prison because you have committed a serious criminal offence.”

The amount of tuna on our tables sourced from fish farming is now nearly half of all the tuna production worldwide. Of course, who would not prefer to eat the occasional fish caught from the wild if resource management becomes sustainable enough to protect it from plundering on the high seas?

Biodiversity apart, the main economic driver for sustainability of the tuna species is the need to ensure that the species will remain accessible as a food resource for future generations.

Various breeding programmes have sprung up as a response to the depletion of wild tuna. It remains to be seen whether hormone induction breeding programmes, such as the one being carried out in Malta, can produce a high enough quality of sushi to compete with tuna from the wild.

Greenpeace disputes the wisdom of tuna breeding, claiming that the amount of fish needed to feed all those extra tuna would create an even greater stresson marine species in alreadyover-fished seas.

Peaceful vegetarianism minus the politics of violence may well be worth dipping into on the path toward preserving life on earth.

razammit@hotmail.com

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