Ethics asks for dignity

Your editorial (“Marketplace fish tossing falls short of offensive,” June 16) identifies the heart of the ethics dilemma, then ignores it.

No one is “perfectly ethical” as you claim, nor should we pretend to be.

PETA takes the extreme view against fish tossing in Seattle, but the takeaway is that we should be as humane and dignified as we can.

In many ways, it is unethical to drink bottled water, buy conventional produce when you could buy organic, drive when you could take the bus, buy products made in sweatshops and ignore civilian casualties in Iraq, but we all do these things because they are the accepted norm.

I am a vegetarian who does not believe it is wrong to eat meat, but am appalled by the inhumane assembly-line treatment of food animals and the devastating environmental damage inflicted by the meat industry.

While eating animals is perfectly natural, ethics means giving them some dignity for unwillingly dying to become our dinner.

Editor, perhaps considering yourself perfectly ethical prevents you from even understanding why playfully throwing dead fish could be offensive to people doing the best they can.

Justin Allan Ryan

Coeur d’Alene