The Shameful Reality of Aquatic Torture and Death Pens

ANIMALSAUSTRALIA.ORG

Life can be so bad for farmed fish they literally lose the will to live

Underwater factory farms are condemning fish to live “on the edge of what they can tolerate”.

• The Shameful Reality of Aquatic Torture and Death Pens

  Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

  One of the things that has troubled me for many years is the way that we treat the fishes of the sea.

  As a species we deny and ignore their sentience. We dismiss them as living beings and refuse to comprehend that these animals think, that they suffer, that they have emotions.

  We literally vacuum them from the sea using highly mechanized machinery to scour the bottom of the sea, to trap them in huge nets or to ensnare them in hooks on long lines that can stretch over a hundred miles across the waves. We suffocate them, we crush them, we tear open their mouth with savage hooks and mutilate their delicate gills in plastic curtains of death and destruction.

  For fish there are no safe places. We have invaded their homes and ravaged their lives, destroyed them by the billions and polluted their habitats.

  And to add insult to injury, not content to murder them in their homes we now breed them in massive confinement facilities that literally fill the air with the stench of decay and death as they spew toxins, parasites and viruses into once pristine eco-systems.

  A Haida elder once told me that salmon farms were a perversion of the spirit of the salmon.

  What we do to them by raising them in concentration camps is obscene.

  We abuse them, we assault them with chemicals, we force them to consume dye in the food pellets to actually dye the flesh pinkish while they are alive. We inject them with antibiotics and force them into toxic chemical baths. We scour the sea to catch millions of other fish from other species to render into cheap fish meal to feed them. We see hundreds of thousands of them die off as the farms collect insurance for the losses and then we send them to market after slicing off the cancerous growths so that humans can have cheap salmon.

  As a species, we cruelly accept that the viruses and parasites that these mass incarceration facilities produce gets transmitted to wild indigenous species of salmon and that the diminishment of wild salmon means the diminishment of food for Orcas, Eagles, Bears, Seals and so many other species of wild sentient creatures.

  These fish that are bred in these horrific facilities are living, self-aware sentient beings that we force into unbearably miserable confines and it takes a toll in suffering and death, pollution and ugliness.

  These shameful facilities degrade not just the salmon but also ourselves.

  They need to be shut down in every eco-system that these companies have invaded.