July 25, 1989.

It was a terrible thing to see.

On Friday night the fishermen brought in a magnificent beast, a 1,200-pound Atlantic Blue Marlin.

As it lay dead on the dock people poked it, pulled its gills, commented on how beautiful it was, and how it must have been in its own world.

The American tourist who caught it at first talked about having it mounted to hang on a wall, but eventually settled for taking home just the hacked-off bill of the fish.

It was hauled up by rope for photographs, trucked from one scale to another to get its record-breaking weight legitimised, and eventually was discarded like so much trash.

In the end, the only point its death served was the death itself. It fed no hungry mouths, served no greater scientific purpose. It provided a few hours of thrill for the fishermen as it struggled valiantly to escape the deadly metal hook covered with coloured plastic it had mistaken for food.

It provided some copy and photographs for the news media, a new entry into the record books, and a sense of accomplishment -- likely fleeting -- for the man who landed it.

On a deeper level, the killing of that fish demonstrated the fundamentally flawed relationship we have with the world in which we live, and with the other life forms with which we share this earth.

Waste: Senselessly, carelessly and brutally that tremendous fish's life was wasted. Like so many other life forms on this planet, from trees to animals, the marlin was expendable in the quenching of petty human want.

We're not arguing that the blue marlin is an endangered species. We don't know if it is or not. There have been fewer than 20 blue marlin of that size ever taken from the Atlantic.

Surely we must have come to a point where we no longer should wait for a species to totter on the edge of extinction before we stop killing it senselessly for the mere sport of it.

The great ocean fishes are ancient life forms which swam our planet's seas millions of years before man's ancestors walked upright. There is no need to slaughter them.

That we continue to do so is an expression of the careless attitude we have toward this planet, an attitude which has brought about the extinction of thousands of other life forms, an attitude which has rendered large areas of the planet desolate, rivers and lakes poisoned and atmospheres weakened.

In the end this attitude threatens to suffocate us, to endanger all life on this beautiful earth, our own species included.

The blue marlin is indeed a beautiful creature. And we should respect it.

Childlike, we should marvel at such a living thing in its natural environment, not lying dead on a concrete pier waiting to be trussed, weighed and tossed aside.

If we need to prove our dominion over this planet, we should start doing it by vowing to protect all living things in it, from the starving innocents to the great animals.

That would truly make us worthy of the role we've taken upon ourselves, the role of masters.