If you read through the entire article, that is part of the point. It's an interesting take on how the judicial system was used in the 1800s with animal cruelty.

Fish don’t actually exist ;)

Wonderful book on the topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50887097-why-fish-don-t-...

...or "fish" is synonymous with "chordata". I'm happy to call myself a fish.

I teach my kids this. its the only reasonable interpretation.

Plus "reptile" is "amniota", making us reptiles.

Well, I thought it was just the crappy reservation school that miseducated me, but I guess we both get to blame government classification for tradition and economics. A scarier subject you will not find. One of my favorite threads on HN has government classifications run to the absurd [edit] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12781157 [/edit]

Extending animal rights laws to fish would be a pretty impactful decision.

So would extending them to farm animals. (I'm aware there are ostensible protections for farm animals, but they offer very little protection even if they were consistently enforced. Animals raised for food are often explicitly exempted from animal protections.)

As do the bulls in bullfighting. They have no rights or protection against torture. All those laws are only good as long as they do not interfere with human behavior. They only have rights as long as it is not uncomfortable for us.

Sounds like the Human Rights Act in New Zealand, and probably lots of countries. You're not allowed to discriminate based on race, sex, age, etc. except for all the cases where people routinely do discriminate in those ways. It pretty much just encoded the existing societal norms rather than actually changing anything.

Impact meaning, good for the environment? I hear again and again that some parts of the sea are nearly empty.

As the article that you didn't read notes, the title comes from a newspaper piece of the time that reflected "confusion about some basic biological concepts".

Fish are actually made from soil. When it slips from the riverbank into the water it, becomes a fish. At least, this theory plus history is the reason catholics may eat fish on their no-meat Fridays.

I thought the fish eating was economic policy to support the fisherman.