Foremost among these thinkers was the gibbon Martin Kürbis, who wrote in his famous Soil and Paw, Water and Fin that we must judge animals by what lasting things they create. Sea creatures didn’t have farming, mining, or industry of any kind. The seas didn’t have writing, tools, or cities. “We cannot blame fish for this lack,” he wrote, “because they are by nature simple.” Any ire he had was reserved for aquatic mammals: traitors to progress possessed of the brainpower to contribute to bettering life on Earth but content to waste their potential flippering around in the water. Seals, dolphins, and whales, he claimed, were traitors to the mammal cause. Their ancestors had walked on land, developed lungs and higher brain functions, and then crawled back into the womb-y wetness when the going got tough. They’d chosen to spend their time mingling with the boneless and the spiny, the water-breathing and utterly alien creatures of the deep, and with that they’d consigned themselves to the role of the dominated. It was therefore morally acceptable for land creatures to keep them, and indeed all lower creatures, in tanks. After all, the sea was just a meaningless churn of life and death, so what difference did it make?

There were those who resisted anti-sea arguments, but the opposition was fractured. There were the reptiles, already marginalized on land, who pointed out that they had many biological similarities to sea creatures and yet participated in land society. There were a few sea mammals who came up to speak about the unseen riches of the depths. There was a movement of small vegetarian creatures, rabbits and mice and the like, who argued that size should never be an ethical determination of consciousness, but they often found themselves shouted down by coevals who were only too happy to let the carnivores eat from the sea so long as it minimized such violence on land. Others went further and argued that making distinctions between any creatures was the beginning of a slippery slope that would always lead to cruelty, intentional or otherwise.

According to the government, the sea could not be recognized as a state actor because its denizens never responded to the various invitations to debates, treaty proposals, and conferences the land creatures had extended to them. They wouldn’t engage meaningfully in a political process.

Alfonzo and Mitchell had both heard the sea-life conspiracy theories. According to some, like Lenny Old Spots, the sea was a breeding ground for death cults, for violent and poisonous and gelatinous anti-land-animal conspiracies. Believers argued that aquariums allowed sea creatures windows onto the land. The puppet masters in the sea were using these tiny sea creatures as their eyes and ears. According to lore, they were watching and waiting for their moment to strike against the landed species.