Thursday, January 22, 2009
At the world’s most elite sushi bars, the adventurous eater can find fish so fresh that they’re still flipping around the plate, their flesh having been swiftly and expertly sliced and then replaced back into their bodies, readied for human consumption. But not even in the world’s top restaurants can one find “Sea Kitten,” the latest target of PETA’s fanaticism.
PETA’s campaign to protect “Sea Kittens,” commonly known as fish, attempts to revamp the image of ocean-dwellers as cute creatures with the same level of intelligence and sensitivity to pain possessed by more beloved animals like dogs and cats. According to PETA spokesperson Ashley Byrne in an NPR report on the new campaign, “Hooking a sea kitten through the mouth and dragging her through the water is the same as hooking a kitten through the mouth and dragging her behind your car.”
Behind PETA’s gruesome analogies and gimmicks, however, lies the important and often overlooked issue of fish “production.”
According to the International Herald Times, global fish consumption is on the rise, doubling since the 1970s, and where there’s a demand, there’s an industry ready to mismanage resources, trick consumers, and pollute the aquatic environment.
Farmed salmon, one of the worst offenders in the seafood market, have much more in common with beef industry cattle than any furry pet. Just like the vast amounts of grain consumed to produce a relatively miniscule amount of beef, farming salmon involves a gross misuse of resources, with a “feed-to-flesh” ratio of three ounces of processed fish used to create one ounce of salmon. The fish being “recycled” into feed are not rejects unfit for human consumption, but merely lower-demand fish such as herring and sardines.
Hundreds of thousands of salmon, all busy with the task of reducing three ounces of fish down to one, create a lot of bodily waste in a small area, which then pollutes the surrounding waters. Unsurprisingly, life packed together in feces-littered water breeds disease and infection amongst the fish, which are then treated with antibiotics. This further damages the ecosystem and helps create drug-resistant strains of bacteria.
Farmed salmon quite literally pales in comparison to its counterpart caught in the wild. Farmed salmon don’t have the opportunity to consume tiny shellfish like krill, which naturally give them their pinkish color. Instead, the farmed salmon’s diet is laden with artificial dyes, which not only helps its aesthetic appeal, but also tricks the senses into believing the dyed hunk of farmed flesh has a higher nutritional value.
While the salmon industry represents the worst of the bunch, farmed fishing of certain types of fish, especially vegetarian species and shellfish, has been handled in a much more ecologically responsible manner and might possibly play an important role in preventing the over-fishing of certain species. Nevertheless, seafood lovers need to make a conscious shift, from species whose farming harms the environment and the fish it produces to fish whose populations are more easily sustained.
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Comments
McConnell: Fish-eaters should stay alert
I think she's telling an anecdote about PETA (an entertaining one that does not reflect on it very well) and then segueing into a discussion on fish farming. I liked this column!
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