When I was a little kid at the volunteer fire company’s annual fundraising carnival, there was a game that gave winners a live goldfish in a water filled plastic bag. You were supposed to take it home and put it in a bowl to be a pet. A crazy guy who was my older brother’s friend on the high school football team was dared to eat the goldfish. A cheering crowd gathered around him as he plucked the goldfish out of the water bag, dropped it into his open maw, and swallowed it whole. No one really protested for the life of the goldfish. If it had floundered out of water like the one in the twitter story, people might’ve been more offended that the harm was without purpose and that it lasted a while. But I guess since this goldfish was eaten quickly, the people figured it served the purpose of providing a person with protein calories. It’s interesting how the different purposes of the harm might change peoples’ reactions. The guy also happened to be one of the first half-black, half-white people I met, so I don’t know if that influenced peoples’ reactions. Maybe some were hesitant to criticize a biracial person.

I wonder how the twitter story’s experiment might’ve gone differently if instead of putting the goldfish on the desk and then walking away, the teacher told the class he was going to swallow the goldfish in ten seconds and then held it over his mouth as he counted down. Would Hannah have interfered within the ten seconds? Or would she figure the teachers’ eating habits are his own business? Lots of people eat fish, maybe even Hannah.