Fishy business

At McDonald's, there's always something to have.

I like the fish.

I like it.

In the barrage of executive orders that President Trump signed this year, one back in April flew low under the radar.

The order aimed, among other things, to allow the expansion of aquaculture or fish farming by relaxing regulations. It's crazy.
The regulation?

It is.

And the president has a point here. In 2022, for the first time, humans ate more fish that came from farms than fish that came from the sea.

Many of us think that this is much better, more ethical, more environmentally sound than overfishing wild fish from the oceans. So why not expand it?

Coming up on Today Explained, Vox's Kenny Torella takes a deep dive lol into what's really been going on on fish farms.

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This is Today Explained.

I'm Noel King with Vox's Kenny Torella. Kenny writes about animal welfare and the future of meat production.
And lately, Kenny has been considering fish farming.

Kenny, how long has this been going on? Well, throughout history, there are examples of small-scale fish farming, but it only took off on a commercial scale in the 1990s.

And it took off really quickly. By the early 2000s, humans were farming well over 200 aquatic animal species.
And most of this has been concentrated in China and India.

But I think what is so noteworthy here is that chickens, pigs, and cows, you know, they were domesticated over thousands of years, while fish have been domesticated, which is essentially kind of forcing them into unnatural conditions, in a matter of decades.

As some marine biologists have written, aquatic domestication occurred 100 times faster than the domestication of land animals and on such a bigger scale.

How big, Kenny, is the fish farming industry? Well, for context, today there's around 85 billion land animals, mostly chickens, pigs, and cows, farmed each year. 85 billion.

But there's an estimated 760 billion fish and crustaceans, which is a figure that is projected to quickly grow.

So another way to put this is essentially nine out of every 10 animals raised for meat are fish.

Fish farming is the fastest growing agricultural sector. in the world.

This is what at Vox, like we like to call a hidden and plain sight story, which is why I wanted to write about it.

You know, the development of fish farming over the last 50 years represents one of the biggest transformations in food production that has received really little attention, but has had huge consequences for food security, for nutrition, for animal welfare, and for the environment.

And the fish that you picked to focus on in your piece for Vox was the humble or beautiful salmon. Why did you pick salmon?

Well, I picked salmon because they have become America's favorite fish to eat.

After shrimp, we eat a salmon more than any other aquatic animal. But salmon farming has also kind of become emblematic of some of the problems with fish farming more broadly.
You know, it...

emerged in the 1970s largely in response to man-made problems. You know, over the previous century, overfishing, industrial pollution, climate change, dams.

These had all come together to really decimate wild Atlantic salmon populations to the point where they were actually added to the endangered species list in the early 2000s, which made it illegal to fish them.

The UN estimates a third of all seafood might be overfished. We're emptying the oceans at an alarming rate.

Worldwide, 80% of commercial fish stocks have been declared fully exploited or overexploited.

So with the goal of taking pressure off of depleted wild populations, seafood producers really began to scale up salmon farming in the 1970s, and it has boomed ever since.

It's become a massive industry.

It's concentrated in Norway, Chile, and the United Kingdom, where they produce almost 3 million metric tons of fish each year, which comes out to be about 560 million salmon.

And about one out of every five

farm salmon are shipped off to the U.S. to stock our grocery store shelves and restaurants.

Okay, so what does this all look like? What's going on at your typical fish farm? Yeah, so I'll talk about salmon farms specifically, although they're all pretty similar.

They're raised by the hundreds of thousands or even millions in floating cages in the ocean, just offshore.

And so it's borrowing all the bad practices that are happening on land, heavy use of pesticides, antibiotics. And this was industrial pig farming out in the ocean.

Hundreds of salmon farms use what are known as open net cages. They release harmful waste into the sea, including salmon lice.

And it's worth noting that, you know, this type of salmon farming and just fish farming in general has a relatively small carbon footprint compared to other meats, which has been a big selling point in its global ascendance over the last few decades.

But salmon farming has also become a flashpoint among environmentalists in Norway, Canada, and the UK, even in the U.S.

You know, Washington state banned salmon farming earlier this year because when you cram so many animals into the ocean and all of their waste, it leads to a lot of pollution.

You know, salmon farmers are often trying to treat or prevent various diseases, which means that they're dumping a lot of chemicals into the water that can hurt other marine life.

And this has actually even pitted salmon farmers against the wild catch fishermen who say that the salmon farms are polluting and killing off the wild fish populations that they depend on for their livelihoods.

I think there's one other reason why the fight over salmon farms have become so symbolic in the environmental movement.

And it's because in the wild, there are these carnivorous hunters who migrate thousands of miles from freshwater rivers out into the salty Atlantic Ocean.

But on salmon farms, they're reduced to swimming in tiny circles for years and eating small man-made pellets.

And so I think for a lot of environmentalists and naturalists, it's seen almost as a crime against nature.

You know, one researcher I talked to compared it to trying to farm tigers, which was a pretty illuminating analogy to me. Yeah, it is.

In the second half of the show, we're going to get into some detail about what exposés have found on fish farms.

It is not for the weak of heart, but if you are a salmon farmer, how do you make the argument for what you do?

Well, the first part has to do with how, like I mentioned earlier, salmon and fish in general tend to have a low carbon footprint compared to, say, beef or pork.

But the other counter-argument is essentially that if people want to eat a lot of salmon and they do,

and there aren't a lot left in the wild, we have no choice but to farm them. Has farming salmon actually helped the numbers of wild salmon rebound?

I mean, if overfishing was the initial problem and the solution is, okay, we're going to farm salmon and let the guys out in the wild do their thing. Was the solution really a solution? Likely not.

Huh? Big picture, you know, research has suggested that there's little to no evidence that farming fish has helped wild populations rebound.

And that's largely because a lot of the fish that are caught in the ocean are fed back to farmed fish.

According to Stanford's Center for Environmental Science and Policy, one pound of salmon takes about 2.4 pounds of other wild fish to produce, usually sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring, and so on.

Some of this fish meal does come from fish byproduct and scraps from other fish that have been processed to be eaten.

But most of it comes from wild caught fish that are being caught just to feed the salmon.

So the effects of salmon on the environment ripple out far beyond the farms themselves to the soy farms and fisheries that feed them.

But looking specifically just at salmon, farming them is actually hurting wild populations in a way that really surprised me as I worked on this story.

So since the 1970s, tens of millions of farm salmon have managed to escape their cages and make their way into the ocean.

Thousands of Atlantic salmon that escape from a fish farm to the east of Victoria into the open waters of Puget Sound, the Pacific Ocean. You're introducing

a non-native invasive species into an environment where you don't know what the

potential outcome might be.

They will spawn and they have produced and have done in the past in multiple events and the progeny they produce are competitively viable meaning that they can compete successfully and in some cases superior to our native salmon.

And when they escape they either compete for resources with wild salmon or they mate with them leading to what experts call genetic pollution that has resulted in a whole new hybrid line of salmon which have a harder time surviving in the wild.

And what that means is that the farming of salmon which was intended to give wild salmon populations a break, actually created this new challenge for them.

All right, so the initial problem that was meant to be solved by salmon farming has not actually been solved.

And then, Kenny, as your reporting later discovered, scientists have been making some really, really interesting discoveries about

what fish actually feel. You want to stick around? We'll talk about that next.
Let's do it.

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Today Explained is back with Vox's Kenny Torella, who's been looking at aquaculture, which is a fancy way of saying fish farming. Kenny, so we talked in the first half about the process.

This is not something that I had ever given a ton of thought to, but increasingly I feel very bad about that. Is it just me? It's not just you.
Okay.

Our colleague Marina Blatnikova recently wrote a story about the scientific debate over fish pain, and she talked about how a lot of us probably never think about fish because they're hard to empathize with.

Unlike, say, a cow. No big eyes.
Exactly.

And while fish make sounds to communicate with one another, we can't hear them.

So, in many ways, they're kind of alien to us. Even animal rights activists have largely ignored fish, even though they are farmed in far higher numbers than pigs and chickens.

You know, humanity's default attitude towards fish has largely just been that they're stupid, that they have incredibly short memories, which is a myth, it turns out, or that they're kind of these mindless automatons, though we now know that some fish species can use tools, they can be trained to perform tricks and solve problems,

and they can even memorize cues or sounds for months. All right, so what you're telling me is fish are a lot more like my beloved dog than I would have assumed.

And the thing is, I would never want to hurt my dog. What do we know about this big question?

Whether fish feel pain? It's a really big question that scientists have been poking at a lot over the last couple decades.

For a long time, the scientific consensus was essentially that fish don't feel pain or much of anything at all. But it was a belief without a lot of evidence.

You know, few scientists had really looked into the question.

But in the early 2000s, a small group of researchers at the University of Edinburgh began to think seriously about fish, and their work has really helped to shift the consensus around fish pain.

They've made a lot of really interesting discoveries.

And the first is that they discovered that fish have nociceptors, which are neurons that send signals to the central nervous system when an animal is injured.

And they also conducted experiments designed to figure out whether fish really feel pain to make sure that they weren't just reacting reflexively to painful stimuli.

And what these researchers found was that, yes, fish do feel pain.

As an example, when they prodded goldfish and trout with needles, they showed activity in parts of their brains associated with higher processing.

Or when rainbow trout were injected with painful substances like acid or bee venom, their respiration rate spiked, their appetites dropped, and they rubbed the affected areas against the walls of their tanks in an effort to soothe themselves.

Taken together, this research really shifted the consensus on whether fish can feel pain, and now the belief that they can't is a pretty minority view in the scientific community.

And just to step back for a moment, what this means is that during the same decades that scientists learned fish can feel pain, the seafood industry began to factory farm them in enormous enormous numbers and in pretty terrible conditions.

If they feel pain, are they conscious? Are fish thinking, observing their environment, et cetera?

Yeah, so to kind of break it down, you know, pain is a sensation that fish can feel, but to experience it, they have to be conscious, or as our colleague Marina Blatnikova put it, to have something that it is like to be them, to subjectively experience the world.

And, you know, what she wrote about is that we can never really know what it's like to be a fish or a dog or even a fellow human, for that matter.

We can only really attest to our own individual consciousness. But I think, you know, few doubt that pigs and chickens on factory farms can consciously feel pain.

That is a kind of an extreme minority view. And at some point, I think we have to extend that benefit of the doubt to fish.
And there's a lot of evidence as to why we should.

All right, now that we know that that fish feel pain, I want you to tell me what you learned about mistreatment on farms. What exactly is happening?

People who study and try to agitate against fish farming liken them to underwater factory farms, where you see a lot of the same problems on factory farms on land being replicated in aquaculture.

A lot of farming industries, including the fish industry, they'll set their own industry standards.

But I talked to one woman named Erin Wing who has spent her career investigating factory farms, and she is really skeptical of these industry standards.

Sort of like they're making their own rules that are going to best serve them.

She worked undercover at a salmon hatchery in Maine, and this is where the fish are born and raised for the first year or so of their life until they're put out into those floating cages in the ocean.

In this facility, there were

at least 25,000 to to

100,000 fish per tank, and

they were swimming in circles constantly, day after day, all day long. The hatchery she worked at in 2019 is owned by Cook Aquaculture, which is one of the world's biggest seafood companies.

And while working there for a few months, she witnessed really terrible treatment. Just huge numbers of fish in tiny tanks, diseases that were eating away at the fish.

There were fish who were dying due to fungal infections and then fish who were afflicted with fungus infections who ended up being killed by the workers.

Fungus ate away his face.

He won't make it. No, he's gonna just suffer and belly fucking dead.
Fish being euthanized by being repeatedly slammed against the sides of tanks. Or even in some cases against metal poles.

And in one case there was a worker who slammed a fish against a metal pole and then proceeded to stomp on the fish when they were unsuccessful in killing the fish by slamming them against the pole.

And then you also have breeding issues. So, for example, on land, you know, chickens have been bred to grow really big, really fast, basically as a way to get more meat out of each animal.

But this has caused a number of health issues. And you see the exact same thing being replicated on fish farms.
On my last last day of the investigation, I spoke with the manager of the facility

and

he saw me looking into a bin that was filled with fish who had been discarded and they were slowly suffocating to death. And he approached me and he just happened to say,

Yeah, it's really rough the way that we kill them. It used to bum me out.

But over the years, you you kind of get desensitized. They just suffocate.
There's dudes. It's so rough.

Over the years you kind of get desensitized. Animals die.

I think these workers, they spend

all day, all day, every day with these animals. I think they know that the animals can feel pain, but

there isn't space for them to connect with the animals

by way of being empathetic toward them or compassionate. There's no room for that in fish farming, I don't think.

I really like fish. I have always viewed it or long viewed it as kind of less sinful than meat and chicken.

But when I read your piece, I went straight to my refrigerator and I put the locks in the freezer and tried not to think about it.

And it will be a while, I'm telling you truthfully, before I eat fish again. So I wonder, Kenny, at the end of the day, should we just not be eating fish?

Well, I don't think the choice necessarily needs to be all or nothing.

I myself am a longtime vegan, but I tell people all the time that simply just eating less meat, especially from the species that tend to be treated the worst, like fish, but also chickens, that can make a really big difference.

But I also learned something really interesting. Some fish species are just way less farmable than others.

A project called Fairfish analyzed how certain species are farmed and whether their farming conditions could ever be compatible with their behavioral and welfare and environmental needs.

And Fairfish found that out of the 100 species they analyzed, only two had the potential to be treated decently on farms, and those were tilapia and carp.

And to be clear, this doesn't mean they are treated decently. You know, most tilapia and carp farms tend to overcrowd their animals.
They face a lot of disease and other welfare problems.

But to me, that study was really illuminating in that it showed

how quickly the seafood industry has domesticated and commercialized fish production without taking a break to say, well, what do they need? Does this make sense?

Should we be much more selective with the species we farm?

One person I talked to, Becca Franks, she's an environmental studies professor at New York University, had a bolder position.

She basically believes that the fish farming industry should switch to forms of seafood that just have way fewer welfare and environmental concerns. One of those is obviously seaweed.

They're plants, but the other one is bivalves, which includes oysters, mussels, and scallops. They can be farmed in a really environmental friendly manner.

And there's also a lot of skepticism that they are even sentient, that they can feel pain.

So she presented that as kind of an alternative to the future of seafood is choosing species where we don't have to grapple with all these trade-offs.

What I hear you saying is it is not all or nothing.

People just need to be conscious about what they're eating and where it's from, which Kenny, I will tell you, I feel optimistic about because the whole point of aquaculture in the first place was that people were aware.

that we were overfishing and it was bad for fish and it was bad for oceans.

So it's not like this is completely hopeless yeah i think the last 50 years of the rapid rise of fish farming teaches us a few things about food systems is that they are

really complex and that maybe we kind of got ahead over our skis with uh rapidly domesticating and farming 200 aquatic species when the whole fish kingdom is incredibly complex and diverse and is not a monolith.

My hope is that in the future, as fish farming grows bigger and bigger, while at the same time we learn more and more about the environmental consequences, the impact on the fish themselves, the seafood industry can be much more intentional and careful

about how seafood is produced.

Kenny Torella is a a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section. Avishai Artsy produced today's show.
Miranda Kennedy Edited. Kelly Wessinger and Laura Bullard check the facts.

And David Tattishore is our engineer. Today's episode was supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Earthshare.

One last thing, this holiday season, if you sign up for a Vox membership, your Vox membership goes further than it does the rest of the year.

When you join Vox as an annual member now, we will gift a free membership to a reader who can't afford a membership. By joining today, you'll get 30% off your annual membership, and we will match it.

Go to Vox.com/slash members to join. I'm Noel King.
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