INVESTIGATION: Undercover footage exposes the ‘cruelty’ of Britain’s salmon farms
Salmon are majestic, intelligent creatures, evolved to swim thousands of miles in their lifetime, that’s their nature. Cramming them, one hundred thousand at a time into tiny nets is torture.
STEPH SPYRO: A film, released in the run-up to Christmas, highlights shocking mortality rates, cross-contamination and pollution that fish are facing. It shows distressing scenes of salmon being “eaten alive” by parasites and highlights the “heinous” nets in which fish live with no space to swim. Many are surrounded by dead or dying fish, with up to a 100,000 individuals in small nets. Animal campaigners have warned overcrowding could allow parasites and diseases to spread rapidly. The film highlights how fish marked as wild fish are being cross-contaminated while swimming past as part of their migration. Formaldehyde, which can cause cancer, continues to be used as a chemical treatment for fungal diseases in farmed salmon.
Mr Vince, who founded Ecotricity, said: “Firstly, the fact that it takes over seven tonnes of wild fish to produce just one ton of farmed salmon is ludicrous. “It’s a monstrous waste and is totally unsustainable.” The UK consumes around 63,300 tonnes of salmon, or 14 million fish, every year. It takes 460,000 tonnes of wild fish to feed the farmed salmon, experts have suggested. Salmon are typically raised in sea pens, spending their whole lives in confinement. Farmers routinely include rounds of antibiotics as part of the rearing process…
Mr Vince said: “The dirty truth of salmon farming in Britain, and around the world actually, has got to be one of the best kept secrets of the animal farming industry… What shocked me, is just how much wild fish it takes to feed these farmed fish – it takes seven tonnes of wild fish to produce one ton of farmed salmon. That’s not just totally unsustainable, it’s utterly absurd, economics of the mad house. Animal agriculture generally is just like this – with cows for example it takes up to ten kilos of human-grade plant protein to make one kilo of beef. We can no longer afford to make our food this way.
Salmon are majestic, intelligent creatures, evolved to swim thousands of miles in their lifetime, that’s their nature. Cramming them, one hundred thousand at a time into tiny nets is torture, like intensive chicken farming or killer whales in the goldfish bowls of Seaworld. And the cramped conditions lead to far more awful things – they live in a literal soup of parasites, cheek by gill with the dead and dying – and those being eaten alive by sea lice. These fish are reared in a cesspit, no wonder one in four of them die from disease and illness before they reach the age of slaughter. SOURCE…
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