'If
Fish Can Feel Pain,
Then Maybe Iraqi Children Can, Too'
By Terry
Jones
5 May, 2003
The recent report by the Royal Society suggesting that fish can feel
pain will come as a severe blow to all those anglers who have hitherto
operated on the principle that fish are incapable of feeling anything.
It comes as an even bigger shock to those of us who have for so long
applied the same principle to human beings.
If fish can feel pain, does
this mean that a 13-year-old child, picked up in Afghanistan, hooded,
flown several thousand miles to Cuba and kept in a chicken coop, may
also experience physical sensations bordering on the uncomfortable?
Like Tony Blair, I thought
the Guantanamo Bay camp was 'an unsatisfactory situation', but it never
occurred to me that the human beings in there would be capable of feeling
discomfort.
In much the same way, I suppose,
George Bush must have assumed that all those prisoners on death row,
whose death sentences he signed as Governor, would never undergo distress
at the prospect of imminent death. Like him I always firmly believed
that human beings were incapable of feeling any unpleasantness.
Otherwise, I used to point
out, why would civilized people like Donald Rumsfeld even contemplate
dropping cluster bombs all over the Middle East where kids will pick
them up or tread on them and get blown to pieces or have their legs
ripped off? If fish can feel, there must be a strong possibility that
small Iraqi children will be unhappy at losing bits of their bodies.
If fish can feel, perhaps
we should rethink some of our other policies. I mean maybe it's not
such a good idea to dump mentally ill people on the streets in the hope
that some passers-by will give them 'community care'? Just suppose that
- like fish - the mentally ill can feel miserable?
At least there is no suggestion
that fish suffer from the cold and wet, so there's no problem in leaving
the mentally ill out on the streets through the winter, but that's not
the point. The point is that we ought to re-examine some of our long-held
and most cherished assumptions.
Like, for example, the idea
that being out of work is just something that happens to some schmucks
but has no bearing on their quotient of personal contentment. If fish
can feel, maybe George Bush should be more worried about the US unemployment
rate reaching 6 per cent than about how fabulous it is that his military
can drop so many bombs and fire off so many missiles in such a short
time.
If fish can feel, perhaps
Tony Blair should reconsider his support for a US administration that
is publicly pledged to visiting war and destruction on any other country
that dares to oppose them.
If fish can feel, perhaps
we ought not to allow the men and women who currently run the White
House to run the world in the way that they clearly intend.
If fish can feel pain, perhaps
it's time to govern human affairs on the principle that human beings
feel pain too.