Whistleblowers recently shared with me a clip from a fish farm. In it, a worker leans over the side of a boat and gently offers dead fish to a seal eagerly waiting by the sea cage. The seal accepts, almost gratefully.
There’s something strangely touching about it – a quiet exchange between human and animal that, for a fleeting moment, feels like care.
READ: THE CATCH
Despite its tenderness, something didn’t quite sit right. Why were there so many dead fish in the first place? And what was this seal doing here, so close to the pens?
Consumes
The footage was recorded on a Scottish salmon farm, a farm that last year saw over 7,000 captive fish die due to predation.
I don’t doubt the worker meant well and that their motivations were kind – it was indeed a moving moment, but it was clearly also a deeply misguided one. It’s a reminder of just how far our relationship with nature has drifted into dysfunction. This broken balance between animals runs deep in the salmon industry.
Take so-called ‘cleaner fish’, for instance. In the wild, species like wrasse and lumpfish live in mutual partnership with salmon, eating lice in exchange for protection.
But in fish farms, millions of these gentle animals are bred or taken from the wild and exploited as living lice-removal devices. Their lives and deaths go entirely unreported. This classic example of symbiosis in the wild has been twisted into something sinister for human gain.
‘Cleanerfish’ aren’t the only wild animals caught up in this senseless system. Each farmed salmon consumes over the course of its lifetime around 440 wild-caught fish – ground into feed and processed into pellets.
Compassion
Anchovies, sardines, and other forage fish are harvested from marine ecosystems in staggering numbers to sustain salmon farms.
These small fish are crucial to ocean food webs, yet they’re violently scooped from the sea, depriving other species – seabirds, whales, and larger fish – of essential nutrition. In the name of farming fish, we are decimating the very foundation of the ocean’s life support system.
While exhausting the sea, the industry is now also turning to the land. In England, the first fully on-land salmon farm has been approved.
My team and I objected to the original proposal, took the consenting Planning Committee to the High Court, and have engaged closely with locals in a bid to stop the site from going ahead but, if constructed, this site would confine one million salmon each year.
It would use as much power as 3,200 homes, release as much waste as a city of 400,000 people, and require as much fresh water per fillet as a human drinks in an entire year. What these vast facilities offer in the form of artificial control, they lack in compassion and common sense.
System
Just last year, more than 6.2 million salmon died in UK freshwater facilities that use similar technologies – the worst year on record. And farms like these globally are plagued by ‘mass mortality events’, whereby hundreds of thousands of animals die suddenly due to equipment failure or worker error.
In Canada, a collapsed filter killed 100,000 fish. In Denmark, a nitrogen spike wiped out 227,000. In the US, a drum filter broke, killing half a million. There have been fires, toxic gas buildups, and even tank collapses. When control fails, the consequences are devastating, and disturbingly frequent.
We’re destroying the very world that sustains us. In factory farms, piglets are mutilated without pain-relief, calves are taken from their mothers within hours of birth, chickens are bred to grow so fast their bones snap under their own weight, lambs are trained to lead others to slaughter, and in some countries the skin of slaughtered calves is placed near lactating cows to trick them into continuing to produce milk.