07/30/18 Stores are not slaughterhouses
Animal Friends continue the campaign "Let’s Respect Our Sea" by appealing to the commercial chains
- Asking retail chains and stores not to sell live fish and crabs
Following the "Let’s Respect Our Sea" campaign launched in co-operation with the European animal welfare umbrella organization Eurogroup for Animals, Animal Friends contacted retailers in Croatia asking them to join the campaign with the decision of not selling live fish and crabs intended for human consumption.
Keeping and killing animals in the store area is a sickening sight for a significant number of customers that repulses them from buying, and for animals it means prolonged pain and suffering before their already agonizing and violent deaths. Stores should not be places where animals are tortured and killed.
After capture, lobsters are packed in metal boxes, with their claws tied. They remain packed on top of each other for days and weeks in refrigerators until they are taken to a store where they are often kept stationary and without food in the aquariums for weeks. Fish aren’t having it any better either in this absolutely unnecessary practice of prolonging the suffering of living beings.
Commercial chains can help resolve this problem hands on. Although keeping of fish and crabs in stores is not regulated by the legal provisions of the Republic of Croatia, the retail chains can independently decide whether they will continue offering live animals in their range of produce.
Animal Friends invite retailers to expand their business ethics by showing they understand the suffering of the weaker and that they are ready to join the world's efforts to constantly improve animal protection. Apart from directly helping fish and crabs, they can additionally improve their reputation and reject any means of confining, torturing or killing animals in their stores, presently and in the future.
Animal Friends invite citizens not to buy live animals kept and killed in food stores. They can help marine animals, the environment and themselves even more, if they buy only plant-based foods.
In addition to appealing to stores and retail chains as part of the "Let’s Respect Our Sea" campaign, Animal Friends also prepared educational signboards related to the ban on fishing on beaches that they offered to cities and municipalities, and are planning further actions.
Author Marina Uzelac created a video initially conceived as a short experimental documentary about the brutality of fish being sold in stores which was in the meantime used as a short film for the song "Everything" by Ivan Šćapec (Eine). With this brief presentation the author wanted to humanize the fish and create a sense of them addressing us.