Fishy business

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.

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 a 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's explain, boxes Kenny Torella takes a deep dive LOL into what's really been going on on fish farms.

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into on the one place. Over 500 top publications covering local and national news, food, sports, daily puzzles, audio and more. New subscribers try it free for one month at news.appel/learn terms apply. This is today explained. I'm Noel King with Vox's Kenny Turella. Kenny writes about animal welfare in 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. It took off really quickly. By the early 2000s, humans were farming well over 200 aquatic animal species. Most of this has been concentrated

“in China and India. But I think what is so noteworthy here is that chickens, pigs and cows,”

they were domesticated over thousands of years. Well, fish have been domesticated, which is essentially forcing them into unnatural conditions in a matter of decades. As some marine biologists have written, aquatic domestication occurred a hundred 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,

around 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 ten animals raised for meat are fish. Fish farming is the fastest growing agricultural sector in the world. This is what at Vox, we like to call a hidden and plain site 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 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, over fishing, industrial pollution, climate change, dams, these had all come together to really decimate wild, built-in xam and 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 over-exploited. So with the goal of taking pressure off of

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 farms 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?”

Yes, 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 is 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 ice. 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 is actually even pitted salmon farmers against the wild catch fisherman 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 exposes have found on fish farms. It is not for the week 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 in fishing 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. Ha, big picture in a 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 farm 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 and chobies, macro-haring, 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

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 it genetic pollution that has resulted in a”

whole new hybrid line of salmon which have a harder time surviving in the wild. 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 you're reporting later discovered, scientists have been making some really, really interesting discoveries about

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Use our link so they know we sent you. Today explained his back with Vox's Kenny Turella who's been looking at aqua culture which is a fancy way of saying fish farming. 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

Blatt and Akova 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

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.”

Humanities default attitude towards fish has largely just been up there stupid that they have incredibly short memories, which is a myth that turns out or that they're kind of these mindless automotons. 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 of 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, a 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 nasaceptors, 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 a 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 bevenum, their respiration rate spiked, their appetite dropped. And they rubbed the affected areas against the walls of their tanks in an effort to sue themselves. Taking together this research really shifted the consensus on weather 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 numbers and in pretty terrible conditions.

“If they feel pain, are they conscious, are fish thinking, observing their environment, etc?”

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 Blentnikova 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, a 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. Hmm. All right. Now that we know 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 like in 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 100,000 fish per tank. And they were swimming in circles constantly

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. Long as eight away, it's base. They won't make it. No, you're gonna just suffer in her silly yeah. 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 and 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 go 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 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. He used to bum me out. But over the years, you kind of get dis sensitized.

They just suffocate. Let's do it. It's still rough. Over the years, you're going to get the 10%

“size animal died. 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 long time 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 hundreds species they analyzed, only two had the potential to be treated decently on farms and those were Talapia and carp. And to be clear, this doesn't mean they are treated decently. You know, most Talapia and carp farms tend to overcrow 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? And one person I talk to Becca Franks, she's an environmental studies professor at New York University, how to 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, their plants, but the other one is Bive Elves, which includes oysters, muscles, 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

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 ocean. 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 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 senior reporter for box's future perfect section. Overshy artsy produced today's show Miranda Kennedy edited Kelly Westinger and Laura Bullard checked the facts and David Tadashore 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 box membership,”

your box membership goes further than it does the rest of the year. When you join box as an animal 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 box.com/members to join. I'm Noel King, it's today explained.

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