I murdered the Fish

On the first day of this year, I was asked to kill some numbers of mud fish (the one that is popularly called cat fish). If you are familiar with the procedure, you will know that this specie is quite slippery and tricky and if one is not careful, the killer is the one that will be the victim, not the fish. This is why people make sure that when they want to kill them, they temporarily disorient them by hitting their heads slightly, then the killer holds the head (with the tail shaking violently) and decapitates it. Failure to hold the head well might reduce the number of fingers you have on your hand. Even after completely severing the head, it still remains alive for a while. Talk about endurance.

So here I was on Jan 1, trying to kill one of the fish, but instead of hitting the fish slightly, I was too hard on it. Because of the hard covering of the head, it did not break but it got a slight dent. All of a sudden, the fish started shaking fiercely, I see them shake all the time but I had never seen anything like that. I knew that it was in serious pain, then it opened its mouth very wide and the whole body swole, it spew out blood and went still and the whole body relaxed. Fish coughing blood? Things like this happen only in nollywood.

I really pitied the fish because I knew I did not kill it, I murdered it. I was a sad sight to watch. The other person with me also felt bad and any other person that saw the scene would have felt that way also.

It then hit me, if we could feel this bad for a fish we were going to eat, how people able to murder fellow human beings without any feeling of compassion. Some of us are very mean to each other, engaging in extreme human torture. Terrorists use a form of brainwashing to recruit mass murderers, I define this type of brainwashing as washing away one’s conscience.

Also, talk about human riot acts, suicide bombings, war without reason and other forms of terrorism. There was the picture that was circulating on facebook showing some people who had just slaughtered a man. They were holding some parts of the body while the main body was just lying there, it was gory. They obviously had no conscience, and when there is no conscience, there can’t be feeling. Hitting or shooting someone and running away is one thing but someone actually staying there, watching and enjoying the scene as he watches a fellow human suffer to death is in sane. I always thought one of the things that differentiates us from animals is conscience, but tell me, how do these people turn to such inhumane creatures?