I QUIT

A large “harvester” of tuna is the Maldives. Alain de Botton, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, reported from a fishing vessel:

The tuna has never been this far out of the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken, and therefore ruin, the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain’s brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large, blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of a prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna’s eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. There is a dull sound….

The fisherman is himself enraged now, striking the beast vengefully, cursing the dying creature in Dhivehi: Nagoobalha, nagoobalha, hey aruvaalaanan (“Bitch! Bitch! You’ve had it now!”).

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2009.06.24 07:33. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2009/06/24/tunahunt/

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