I went pescatarian 2 years or so ago, I’m not vegetarian and don’t call myself that, but other people do and I’m always correcting them, I know I’m falling short of being a vegetarian. My FIL also eats fish not other meat and refers to himself as vegetarian which irritates me but not my place to correct him. It used to drive me insane at uni I lived with two utterly idiotic judgemental mean girls who looked down on the rest of us because we ate meat (once sniffily referred to as ‘things with faces’) but they themselves are chicken and fish. I asked them once if chicken and fish were plants then, they just sniffed at me in a superior fashion.
I haven’t got all the answers as to why I’ve made the choices I have - I stopped feeling comfortable eating meat (mammals and birds) due to issues with farming and slaughter, if I could guarantee that all animals were kept in ideal conditions and then killed quickly and humanely I probably would have kept eating them (though if I had that guarantee now I wouldn’t go back to eating them as I don’t think I could now).
Why did I think fish didn’t count? I’m not totally clear on that if I’m honest. It was hard to give up meat and so it became kind of a process - still eating fish was a step on the way. I relied upon it a lot at first, now I eat very little and make more properly veggie choices. I’m conscious of sourcing and only buy/eat sustainable and responsibly sourced but I know that doesn’t actually answer the question. There’s something in the back of my mind about eating wild fish that are going to exist and be eaten by larger predators anyway, rather than only breeding and keeping farmed animals for the sole purpose of killing and eating them, but that’s kind of a cop out though it makes some sense to me.
At the end of the day, it’s a bit of a shitty compromise on my part and I own that, but it’s my personal choice that I don’t try to impose on anyone else, and I don’t judge anyone else either.
I can’t watch The Island but I have massive issues with the series a while back when they killed the pig so awfully and inexpertly so as to cause maximum distress all round. What a dreadful and needlessly cruel thing to do. Don’t give a fuck that you’re ‘in the wild, trying to survive’ - you don’t have to be there, you’re not shipwrecked or survivors of the zombie apocalypse, you’re making a tv programme. So either teach participants how to do it properly, or send an expert in to do it, or make the pig off limits - I don’t care that it would temporarily ruin the illusion that you’re in a real survival situation, the production team was never going to let you die.