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Most of us like eating fish, but nobody wants to cuddle them. The consequence is that, while otters, seals, elephants, rhinos and even foxes have powerful political constituencies to fight for them, mankind is doing disastrous things at sea without anybody seeming to care much.
Environmental organizations often damage their own causes by overstatement. I am among those who have criticized Greenpeace and its brethren for abusing statistics and indulging in some pretty wild scaremongering. But Greenpeace is absolutely right, in its report published last week, to highlight the scandal of some supermarkets - Asda is branded the worst offender - selling threatened fish species.
The world's oceans are being plundered, and nobody seems willing or able to stop the slaughter. Some fish and crustaceans are successfully farmed: trout and oysters, to name but two. Stocks of others are sustainable, such as herring, sardines, whitebait and mussels. Many species, however, are in desperate trouble, including tuna, plaice, monkfish and cod. Over the past half-century, the world's annual fish catch has risen from 18m tons to 95m. The latest figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization suggest that 52% of commercial fish species are fully exploited, 17% overexploited and 8% depleted.
It is striking to contrast the wave of alarm, if not panic, sweeping the world about avian flu with our indifference to the plight of fish. As long as there are fillets in the shops, we buy them. When species vanish, people shrug and eat something else.
Two important recent books have detailed the world's fishery crisis - Michael Wigan's Last of the Hunter Gatherers, in 1998, and Charles Clover's End of the Line, in 2004. Both tell the same horror story, but neither has prompted useful political reaction. Wigan quotes a Scottish saying, from the days when God was feared. If herring deserted a locality, fisherfolk said, it was because of "the wickedness of the people". In a rather different sense from that intended, the old sages have proved right. Clover invites us to imagine how the world would react if a mile-wide net attached to a steel bar were dragged across the plains of Africa, scooping up or destroying everything in its path - lions, cheetahs, rhinos, elephants, impalas and warthogs. This, he says, is what modern trawlers are doing every day in the oceans of the world.
One-third of the total catch is discarded - dead - as commercially worthless. Nets flatten reefs and aquatic plants. Laws on catch sizes are routinely flouted. Industrial netsmen are estimated to reduce any newly discovered fish community to one-tenth of its size within a decade. Ever bigger boats, with ever more monstrously "efficient" equipment, attack diminishing shoals of fish. Ireland's new super-trawler, Atlantic Dawn, is the biggest such vessel ever built, and accounts for one-third of the nation's fishing capacity. Off northern Scotland, birds and fish are suffering from the near genocide of the sand-eels they eat, taken by netsmen for fishmeal.
Crazily, for social reasons most governments underwrite the killing. Japan is top of the annual subsidy league (£1.4bn) followed by the EU (£644m) and the US (£617m). Individual EU nations, headed by Spain, France, Ireland and Italy, give additional top-ups.
Charles Clover writes: "The fact that the sea is presided over by lunatics who believe there should be commercial fishing in 100% of the sea breeds a culture that is corrosive. Two erroneous beliefs have been allowed to flourish. First, that you can cheat biology. Second, that you can keep people happy in far-flung communities in the west of Ireland, Scotland and Spain by allowing them to fish, when the gallop of technology means that this year maybe only half a dozen people in the village can fish sustainably, and next year it
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