The Crabbing Excursion

The text of this brief essay, or autobiographical snippet, or “ars poetica” maybe, was composed mostly in late 2022, but it is in connection with a series of essays that I am currently in the process of writing and publishing elsewhere, first and foremost on the Catholic website Where Peter Is.

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When I first conceived of a series of moral, philsophical, and theological arguments that I have recently been developing, I decided that I could not credibly make these arguments if I were not making them from personal experience of having killed. Many of these arguments were to be phenomenological in nature and oriented towards compassion and attempts at empathy; this would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, had I not made that decision early on. Since I had no interest in committing murder, was not in a social or legal position to be sent to war, and would have be unable to write if I had successfully committed suicide, I decided to investigate taking nonhuman life via hunting or fishing.

            The arch wording of the previous sentence notwithstanding, deciding to go hunting or fishing as preparation for this moral and intellectual project had a number of moral and intellectual advantages. First, the amount of moral injury that I would incur by killing an animal for a clear, biologically necessary purpose (eating) would be enough to write compassionately but not so much that I would seriously endanger (as I see it) my own soul, as I would by poisoning pigeons or burning ants with a magnifying glass. Secondly, there are complex cultural technologies around hunting and fishing that intersect with and often actively inform cultures of violence around other issues like war, law enforcement, and domestic abuse.[1] Thirdly, those cultural technologies are present and vital in my own culture—the periurban-to-rural Northeastern United States, especially New England and nearby parts of Upstate New York—and in some cases within my own extended family. Finally, they are also highlighted in a great deal of cross-cultural Sturm und Drang about my culture of first, greatest, and deepest academic interest, Japan with its stubborn favorability towards or defensiveness about whaling.

            The decision to which I eventually came was to go crab fishing with an older member of my extended family on a visit to Cape Cod, where I have several relatives. This was in late summer or early autumn of 2022. This family member of mine, who is in his eighties, has a type of crab trap that the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game Division of Marine Fisheries had banned in 2021 for the following reason:

Blue crabs are commonly found in the state’s southern estuarine habitats, which are often shared with diamondback terrapins. Diamondback terrapins are listed as a threatened under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act. Given the overlap of these species’ habitat, traps fished for blue crabs may incidentally catch and drown these protected turtles. To prevent this from occurring, the use of trap gear in the blue crab fishery is now prohibited.[2]

The state did not prohibit the crab fishery entirely, and alternative gear with which one might catch blue crabs was and is inexpensive and plentiful on Cape Cod. The regulation suggested “actively tended fishing gear such as dip nets, collapsible traps, and trot lines,” three options of which the first in particular was readily available.[3] Nevertheless I was faced with the moral choice of using my family member’s now-prohibited gear or buying new gear. Eventually I decided to buy new, still-legal gear for myself but not overtly bring up the issue with my uncle, since old people are set in their ways regarding such things and the potential for interpersonal friction if I were to be seen as guilt-tripping him about it seemed to outweigh the potential of him accidentally killing a diamondback terrapin. In making this decision I consulted with two other family members and with a close friend, all of whom I consider morally responsible when it comes to the natural world. All agreed that I should not use the now-prohibited gear myself, yet all also agreed that I should not expend too much effort in attempting to stop my uncle from using it.

            The crabbing excursion ended up being put on indefinite hold because I had to head home early due to a minor, unrelated personal problem. Nevertheless, I find my own moral decision-making in this matter illustrative in retrospect, despite not having been able to act on my decisions. What I would have passively allowed my uncle to do was, legally, poaching, a word that many people associate primarily with maniacal dentists trekking to Africa to shoot famous lions but that strictly means any kind of hunting that violates a governmental order of some kind. The principled belief that all legal actions are moral and all illegal actions are immoral is extremely rare (although unprincipled rhetorical assertions of that view are not, especially in conversations regarding sexual ethics and the ethics of incendiary ideological speech). In this case, however, the Massachusetts regulation at issue had an obvious moral salience, at least for my purposes as I contemplated nature as a moral object and violence against nature as an actually or potentially immoral type of act. There are people who feel very strongly about this; as of this writing, the only Google review for the Division of Marine Fisheries is a one-star review reading, in its entirety, “What the hell are you people doing there? STRIPED BASS MORATORIUM MOW” (sic).[4]

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Postscript: In July 2023, I finally went on the crabbing trip, with my aunt and mother rather than my uncle. We caught and ate four blue crabs, using Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries-approved methods. I was pleased and impressed to find that the crabs are fighters; one lacerated my aunt’s hand while already almost entirely submerged in boiling water. One does not feel especially bad about killing them because in order to do so one must do battle, and it is a battle that one can conceivably lose.

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[1] Vegetarian and vegan activists and scholars often observe this, and are, in my opinion, right to notice it. However, much vegetarian and vegan polemic on the subject ignores or minimizes cultural attitudes outside the Western mainstream in which hunting and fishing are perceived quite differently. Scholarly texts dealing with the subject, with varying degrees of specificity or generality and representing a deliberately diverse geographical and temporal range, include Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2013); Simon J. Bronner, Killing Tradition: Inside Hunting and Animal Rights Controversies (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Joanna Kafarowski, Gender, Culture, and Northern Fisheries (Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2009); Kyoko Kusakabe and Sirayuth Thongprasert, Women and Men in Small-Scale Fisheries and Aquaculture in Asia: Barriers, Constraints and Opportunities towards Equality and Secure Livelihoods (Bangkok: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2022); Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England 1485-1640 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Vincenzo Ruggiero, “Moby Dick and the Crimes of the Economy,” The British Journal of Criminology Vol. 42, No. 1 (Winter 2002): 96–108.

[2] Commonwealth of Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, “New Prohibition on Trapping Blue Crabs,” April 16, 2021.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Aaron U, review of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Google. Accessed December 22, 2022.