This isn’t your usual fish story. Three divers are in deep water after an outdoor New Year’s party in Denmark. While the charges against them may eventually include illegal fishing and animal abuse, what actually happened with the divers, a pike and a bottle of champagne sounds more like a case of DWI (diving while intoxicated). According to Reuters news services, the three frogmen are being investigated after a news photo in the Nowa Trybuna daily showed them "neck-deep in a lake, with one of them tipping a bottle of cheap Russian bubbly into the fish’s open mouth." One of the divers explained that they found the pike half-dead and wanted to "restore it to consciousness by treating it with champagne." Greater love hath no man. Rather than fishy, their story sounds plausible. A pike would have to be half-dead to be captured with bare hands and posed for a picture. Because of its razor-sharp teeth, capable of reducing human flesh to something resembling shredded New Year’s confetti, it’s highly unlikely anyone would want to be near the pike’s open mouth under normal circumstances. Before the authorities utter "poor fish" one more time, perhaps they should consider the possibility that the fish had been imbibing earlier in the evening. Why else would we have the expression, "drunk to the gills"? Fish and drinking have been linked together for a long time. That’s why we say someone drinks like a fish and someone who drinks too much is said to be "tanked." It’s why we have no problem eating pickled herring or pickled perch. In defense of the divers, it’s possible the fish charged toward the divers’ bottle of champagne on its own after it saw the cork. Fish seem naturally attracted to corks and that’s why we fish with cork bobbers. Perhaps the divers in the news photo weren’t forcing champagne into the pike, but were simply trying to remove the pike’s mouth from the cork-end of the bottle. Retrieving the cork before it could be swallowed by the pike was undoubtedly viewed as a safer alternative than applying mouth-to-gill resuscitation and running the risk of a lacerated face. Although the divers are facing animal abuse charges from the Danish police, Americans might avoid taking sides. After all, we shouldn’t be too quick to criticize the divers when we, as students, gulped down all of those live goldfish during the 60s. Who are we to throw the first stone while live oysters are being shucked and served at street stands in New Orleans? Several years ago while we were on vacation, my husband and I stopped at one of those stands. After watching the burly man behind the counter shuck one oyster after another, we decided to try eating them raw for the first time. The limp, little oyster bodies were carefully placed on two crackers and sprinkled with dashes of hot sauce. Following the shucker’s directions, we chewed each treat three times and swallowed. "When did that oyster actually die?" I asked, wiping my mouth with a paper napkin. "When it was pulled from the ocean or when you removed it from its shell?" He smiled knowingly. "It died with your first bite." When it comes to sea-life cruelty charges, I would have to plead guilty.
