Ten Years Before

WARNING: Mentions of animal abuse and suicide. Reader descretion is advised.

Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 

Berufjörður, Eastern Iceland
November, 2012

Julius Eriksen, captain of the fishing boat Hvidhal, was not sure about what he was going to do.

He knew what he was going to do, of course. He'd been paid a lot of money for it, by a man who spoke with a strange accent and had said a lot of big words. And he was nothing if not a man who knew his trade very well, and wanted badly to support his family through that trade. Three thousand US dollars was not something you sneezed at, not if you knew anything about exchange rates and cared about keeping your house.

But Julius was starting to have second thoughts, the intrusive little voices that, just as you find yourself set on doing something, pipe up and go "Here, can't we have another talk about this?"

It was a bad time to have them, too. He was on the deck of the Hvidhal, and they were waiting for word from the boats that had gone up ahead. The day was fine - no clouds, a pale blue sky, but still chilled by an icy sea wind blowing in from the west. A wind that pulled at the tangled mass of his hair and beard and threw the faint, salt spray of the waves over the side of his boat. His men were waiting all around him, as tense with anticipation as he was.

So the second thoughts were very unwelcome at the moment.

Seven Years Before

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
- Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

For a long time, mankind has found amusement in the suffering of others. There's something about seeing somebody go through some sort of pain and knowing it isn't you that's darkly reassuring or entertaining. It appeals to the remnants of ape in the back of the head, the part of us that looked at what the leopard just did to their troopmate and think 'hey, that's one less male I have to fight to chat up Doris over there'.

When the average man does it to the average man, it's called schadenfreude, and people laugh about it. When governments do it to the average man, it's called tyranny and people tend to do something about it, or at least grumble. The Romans were smart enough to sell popcorn when they did, which made it entertainment and so it was okay, even though people were still getting killed horribly.

When humans do it to animals, its a lot more complicated. Some animals, like dogs and cats, were smart enough to realize that acting cute was an eternal meal ticket for them. Anything done to them was considered unthinkable. Others, like cows and pigs, weren't so quick on the uptake, and so nobody makes a fuss when entire herds go into the big shed and never come out again. 

And then there were those who were quick on the uptake, but they weren't dogs or cats, so it didn't matter. And the only people who cared were those in white coats, and okay, maybe they stroked you and fed you fish, but that was as far as that went. You didn't have fur or big honest eyes, so there was nothing preventing you from being shoved in a tank several times too small for you and made to do somersaults. When people did that to animals like that, it was called entertainment. The ideas the Romans left behind were a lot more tenacious than first thought.

Or perhaps not.

In 2016, The Orca Welfare and Safety Act was passed by the California Assembly. It meant one thing, and one thing only. No more animal shows. No more dragging these actually quite intelligent out of the ocean and making them do tricks. No more breeding animals just to keep it going. Someone, somewhere, had turned around to ancestral memory of the Roman, the man who sat and laughed while a spear went through a lion's throat, and said 'no, this is not okay, and honestly your nose is hideous'.

There were a lot of people upset about this. But one of them wasn't.