FOOD FOR THOUGHT - From
Compassionate Cooks.com/blog
by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau - 30 May 2007
Most of us don't think too much about it and
the rest of us are unaware that our consumption of fish leads to
the demise of other fish, cetaceans (such as whales, dolphins,
and porpoises), birds, and ecosystems. Now, for me – like for
many people – fish were the last animals I stopped eating. First
were land animals (though hoofed animals did come before birds),
then aquatic animals and their secretions (ya know fish eggs),
then the secretions from land animals – chicken’s eggs and cow’s
milk. So, at the time I was still eating fish – and mind you, I
was an animal advocate at the time – totally missing the boat on
my role in the suffering of aquatic animals – I remember
starting a conversation with my now-husband, who joined me on
this journey when we met over 12 years ago. I wanted to explore
why we – not just us specifically but humans in general – could
eat certain animals and be appalled at eating others. Was it the
cute factor? Was it size? Was it their similarity to – or lack
thereof –humans? Our ability to identify with them? Have
relationships with them – or not? What was it?
As David and I talked about this, we tried to
come up with a reason we were able to justify eating aquatic
animals and not eating land animals - insofar as we were even
doing it consciously. Every avenue we went down, we just
couldn’t do it. We just couldn’t find a good enough reason.
Excuses? Yes. Justifications? Yes. Solid reasons that were good
enough to make us feel comfortable eating them? No. And I
remember saying – damn, well, we can’t keep eating them. That’s
it. I just can’t do it. And so we stopped. That was it. Fish
were out.
I mentioned in another episode that one of my
blocks – even though I was eating other fish – was lobster,
because I could see the whole body and had to break the body
myself in order to eat it. Couldn’t do it – I could see it for
what it was – ya know a body – a head, eyes, legs. And now, when
I think back to eating shrimp – the idea of just biting into
their entire body – just breaking the body with my teeth is
repulsive to me. I just hate thinking about it. But I did it for
a long time. And now I’m glad I don’t do anymore.
So, we have a lot to talk about, and I thought
we would start with one of the aspects of fishing that we don’t
think about a lot – we don’t hear about a lot, and that’s the
inevitable, expected, inherent part of commercial fishing called
by-catch.
I had been planning on covering this topic for
a long time, but it was an email I received that inspired me to
put it at the top of the queue. I’ll just read you a bit of the
email – it’s from a gentleman named Karl, who lives in Arizona.
“Since in every podcast you ask about topic
suggestions I will mention something that was one of the hardest
things for me personally to give up: Sushi. I thought I would
never give up fish until I saw a video podcast by Greenpeace,
called “Thanks for all the Fish,” which shows a legal fishing
boat as they pull up their catch. In the podcast, they show how
many endangered animals they legally pull up and kill. This
podcast above all other arguments changed my mind about eating
fish.”
We often hear the quote: "10 billion animals
are killed for human consumption every year in the United
States. Worldwide, I believe it’s 45 billion," but it’s more
accurate to say that “10 billion LAND animals are killed for
human consumption every year in the U.S. Otherwise, we’re just
disregarding the billions of aquatic animals killed for the same
purpose – human appetites. Although the number of aquatic
animals killed for consumption in the United States goes
unreported, annual estimates are more than 17 billion in the
U.S. alone, and sport fishing and angling kills another 245
million animals annually. So, basically, we’re talking about
over 27 billion animals – both land and aquatic – being killed
every year in the U.S. so we humans can eat them. We’re not
talking about survival – we’re talking about appetite. And these
numbers don’t count the millions of aquatic animals killed as
incidental catch.
By-catch refers to unintended or unwanted
animals caught by the fishing industry. It is estimated that
by-catch-related mortality is causing population declines in 13
out of the 44 species of marine mammals that are suffering high
death rates from human activities. Commercial fishers use a
number of techniques for ensnaring animals, from setting miles
of line and baited hooks (called longlines) to catch animals
such as sharks, swordfish, and tuna; to using large nets to
catch schools of fish. These large nets are towed underwater by
what are called trawlers. A trawler is a fishing vessel designed
for the purpose of operating a trawl, a type of fishing net that
is dragged along the bottom of the sea (or sometimes just above
the bottom at a specified depth).
A single pass of a trawl removes up to 20% of
the seafloor fauna and flora. And the fisheries with the
highest levels of by-catch are shrimp fisheries: 80%-90% of a
catch may consist of marine species other than the shrimp being
targeted. I just wanna make sure you heard that: 80%-90% of
the animals caught in these nets that are targeting shrimp and
prawns are actually non-target animals – they’re by-catch.
Shrimp are bottom-dwellers, which is why
trawling nets are used to – remove them from the ocean. Since
even jumbo shrimp are really small, the nets used to catch the
shrimp are very fine, which means these nets scoop up all the
animals – all the life – found on the ocean’s floor. According
to a 2003 U.S. News and World Report article on fishing and its
detrimental affects on the oceans of the world, every pound of
shrimp that’s caught results in the killing of ten pounds of
other marine life. According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature,
in the Gulf of Thailand it can be 14 pounds of by-catch per
pound of shrimp.
Now, a lot of the dead by-catch is made up of
tiny animals that people don’t have emotional attachments to –
you know, they may not be cute like baby seals or dolphins – but
they contribute to the oceans’ biodiversity and they have a
right to be there – to live.
The other thing to consider is that the
dredging along the ocean floor also breaks up coral and the
habitats of bottom-dwellers. And because the same areas are
dredged again and again, it’s not like these habitats and
inhabitants have time to recover before being destroyed again.
So, if you consider yourself an “environmentalist,” and most
people do - it’s something to consider. Fish populations,
communities, and ecosystems are being destroyed so we can have
shrimp cocktail – and I used to eat that. I used to eat shrimp
cocktail.
Now - by-catch is often discarded back into
the ocean already dead or dying. Many are half-alive and die
slow, unnecessary deaths. Trawl nets in general, and shrimp
trawls in particular where the discard may be 90% of the catch,
have been identified as sources of mortality for many species of
concern, including endangered animals and cetaceans, such as
whales, dolphins and porpoises. Sea turtles, already endangered,
have been killed by the thousands in shrimp trawl nets.
Another way to put this is anywhere between
6.8 million and 27 million tons of fish could be being discarded
each year. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but part of the
problem is that we tend to have pretty myopic vision. We may be
looking at the one fish on our plate or the 5 shrimp in our
seafood salad, but countless numbers of animals were dredged up
and killed for the individuals we see on our own plates.
Now, we’ve been talking primarily about the
by-catch caused by trawling nets and shrimp nets, but there are
other commercial fishing methods that also result in by-catch.
Nets tend to kill cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises and whales),
and longline fishing kills birds, for instance. As for the first
group, an estimated 300,000 cetaceans (whales, dolphins and
porpoises) die as by-catch each year, because they are unable to
escape when caught in nets. So, you may not think cod fish are
particularly cute, but most people get pretty emotional about
whales, dolphins, and porpoises. So, if we don’t consider the
cod, perhaps we can consider the animals for whom we do have
sympathy.
It has been estimated that a staggering 100
million sharks and rays are caught and discarded each year. Tuna
fisheries, which in the past had high dolphin by-catch levels,
are still responsible for the death of many sharks.
Again, sharks don’t inspire warm cuddly
feelings and they’re perceived as a great menace to humans. In
reality, sharks typically attack fewer than 100 people per year,
killing fewer than 20, and it’s not because they’re evil; it’s
because they think we’re prey, because, as noted by the
International Shark Attack File, human population growth means
more people in the water every year. And, continued human
pollution means less habitable water for sharks. In addition to
the millions of sharks we kill each year as by-catch, we kill
between 26 to 73 million sharks for their fins alone. It’s
common practice to catch the sharks, cut off their fins, then
throw their dismembered bodies back into the ocean. Just the
thought of that is so, so disturbing to me. So, even if you
might not want to cuddle up next to a shark, it doesn’t mean
they deserve what we do to them. They’re victims of our
appetites as well.
I mentioned birds being killed in long lines,
and I just wanted to follow up on that. Birds dive for the bait
planted on long fishing lines, they swallow the bait along with
the hook, are pulled under the water, and drown. Around 100,000
albatrosses are killed by longline fisheries every year,
particularly where tuna are fished, and because of this, many
species are facing extinction. This is very prevalent in the
waters off Chile, where sea bass is aggressively hunted by boats
towing fifty-mile longlines. 50 miles long!
DOLPHINS
The public became aware of the problems of by-catch in
the 1980s when campaigns were led against tuna companies for
harming and killing dolphins when tuna were the targets. The
relationship between dolphins and tuna is that yellowfin tuna
follow and school beneath dolphins, so fishing fleets would look
for dolphins on the surface, herd them and encircle them and set
out the nets to catch the tuna – ensnaring the dolphins at the
same time. An estimated 7 million dolphins have been killed by
this fishing method over the past four decades, the largest
marine mammal kill in history.
In 1986, the International Marine Mammal
Project organized a campaign, including a consumer boycott of
tuna, in order to urge U.S. tuna companies to end the practice
of intentionally chasing and netting dolphins and to adopt
"Dolphin Safe" fishing practices to prevent the drowning of
dolphins in tuna nets. Dolphins are mammals and don’t have
gills, so they drown while stuck in the nets underwater. There
are other standards that a company must adhere to in order to
label their tuna “dolphin-safe,” but it’s worth noting that just
because it says “dolphin-safe” or “dolphin-friendly,” its
doesn’t mean that dolphins were not killed in the production of
a particular tin of tuna. It means that the fleet which caught
the tuna did not specifically target a pod of dolphins.
Though the numbers are down since new
techniques are used to catch tuna (400,000 dolphins killed
annually in the 1960s and 100,000 in the 1980s), several
thousand dolphins are still killed each year to satisfy our
appetites for tuna. Dolphins, social, playful, intelligent
animals, are also killed as by-catch in nets targeting trout.
According to a 2003 BBC story by Alex Kirby called “Nets
Kill 800 Cetaceans a Day,” more than 800 dolphins,
porpoises, and whales die every day as they get tangled in
fishing nets – that’s 300,000 every year.
TURTLES
Turtles are also common victims. Sea turtles are
killed by the thousands. It’s estimated that more than 20,000
sea turtles die each year after getting hooked on longlines. Six
of the seven species of marine turtles are listed as Endangered
or Critically Endangered, and the outlook is increasingly grim.
In the Pacific, leatherbacks are heading for extinction, fast,
and in the Mediterranean, green turtle numbers have plummeted.
Though pollution and disease contribute to this, the nets and
long-lines of fishing fleets play a major role in their demise.
According to Duke University who recently
conducted a global assessment of the problem, more than 250,000
loggerhead and 60,000 leatherback turtles are snared each year
by commercial longline fishing, and tens of thousands die. The
authors estimated that longline fleets from 40 different
countries set about 1.4 billion hooks in the studied year of
2000 the equivalent of about 3.8 million hooks each day.
Again, longlines are fishing lines that can
stretch for 40 miles and dangle thousands of individually baited
hooks. They are set at optimal depths and times to catch tuna
and swordfish, shark, and other fish, and according to the data
studied, the turtles most often die – not by drowning by some
kind of injury related to hooking or entangling.
SEALS
Another by-product of the fishing
industry is the brutal death of baby seals. Because of the
Overfishing of cod by the Canadian fishing industry in eastern
Canada – in the Atlantic Ocean for Newfoundland’s northeast
coast, the cod population declined to such a degree that the
government stepped in the late 1980s and imposed severe
restrictions on commercial fishing. But it was too late. Because
of overfishing, the fishery collapsed, never recovered (and
never will), and the ecosystem changed such that it was no
longer able to support cod fish.
What does all this have to do with the seals,
you ask? Scapegoating the seals for the collapse of the cod
fisheries, fishermen demanded a kill. In 2003, the Canadian
government bowed to pressure from the fishing industry and
ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands of seals,
declaring war on the seals in hopes that massive seal kills will
bring back the cod and keep their disgruntled fishermen working.
In fact, cod is not a major food source of the harp and hood
seal diet.
Further, recent evidence suggests that killing
seals contributes to bacterial infestation on the ocean floor
which leads to hypoxia, a condition in which patches of ocean
lose all the dissolved oxygen and are unable to sustain cod or
fish or marine life of any kind. However, these facts seem to
have been brushed aside by the Canadian Department of Fisheries
and Oceans in their efforts to justify and continue the
slaughter. During the 3-year period of 2003-2005, the Canadian
Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) allowed a kill quota of
975,000 baby and adult harp seals and 30,000 adult hood seals.
When the "struck and lost" seals are included (these are the
animals who’ve been hit but lost in the icy waters), the total
killed exceeds one million, making this the largest marine
mammal slaughter in the world.
To find as many avenues as possible to profit
from the annual, government-subsidized slaughter, Canada exports
sealskins (furskins/pelts and leather), seal oil, and seal meat.
Unfortunately, the demand for seal pelts has sky-rocketed,
especially in Europe. Though seal meat isn’t doing so well, the
Canadian government is trying to find markets for the bodies of
the skinned seals.
The kill continues to this day; even as I
write this. The quota for the 2007 massacre is 270,000, and as I
write this, 213,000 have been killed this year. Visit
www.protectseals.org
for more information about this horrific annual slaughter.
[Editor's Note: see the protect
seals
action alert for March 20, 2008
for updated details and information on how to help end this
barbaric industry.]
TSUNAMI
Finally, while we’re talking about
by-products/effects (not just by-catch), there is another
by-product of consuming aquatic animals that went under the
radar screen when an earthquake and subsequent tsunami in
southeast Asia destroyed lives and communities at the end of
2004. Over 200,000 human lives were lost and uncounted non-human
lives. Experts agree that the destruction of coral reefs and
mangrove trees played a significant role in the destruction
caused by the tsunami. In many countries across Asia, including
Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, mangroves stood all along
the coasts in shallow waters. They offered protection against
things like tsunamis. Over the last 20-30 years, they were
cleared for shrimp or prawn farms. The shrimps and prawns are
sold to Europeans and other foreigners at a price that does not
take into account the environmental cost. The destruction of the
coasts was also due to the building of large resorts where they
should never have been built.
Of course, there are efforts to rebuild the
shrimp farms, and we’ll see if we learn anything from the
disaster. I’m a little skeptical, considering the fact that
worldwide, shrimp farming has grown at an annual average of over
18% since 1970, and is the single most valuable internationally
traded seafood product worldwide, valued at an estimated $50-60
billion at the point of retail.
So the cost of our consumption of aquatic
animals is extremely high. Not just to the target species who
were living perfectly lovely lives before we come along and
snatch them out of their homes but also to the non-target
species and entire ecosystems. And this is just one aspect of
this issue. We have yet to talk about all the others, including
factory-farm raising fish, the pollution in the ocean, the
fishing of smaller fish to feed to the larger fish we raise to
eat, the toxins, such as mercury, in the fish that we consume
when we eat their bodies, the research that supports the fact
that fish feel pain, the human health concerns of eating fish,
the problems with “catch and release sport fishing,” and more. I
can do an entire podcast on salmon alone and the many problems
with consuming it – from the problems with farm-raised Atlantic
salmon, which is probably one of the worst choices we could
make: The fish are raise in cramped pens in the ocean; their
waste pollutes the surrounding water and spreads disease to wild
fish. In the Pacific, escaped farm-raised salmon also compete
with wild fish for food and interfere with spawning.
Furthermore, salmon are fed a diet of fish meal (tinted to give
their flesh that characteristic "salmon pink" color) which
further depletes the ocean food chain. Wild Washington or Oregon
salmon is a poor choice since overfishing and habitat
destruction have endangered many species.
Anyway, just some food for thought before we
return to this topic. And do re-visit the podcast called "Skip
the Middle Man" to answer your questions about the importance of
Omega 3 fatty acids – not from fish but from plant sources.
Because don’t forget: the fish have to consume the fatty acids
from the phytoplankton, from the algae. If they don’t consume
it, they don’t have it in their flesh.
Until next time, consider this: A
recent issue of Fish and Fisheries Magazine cited more than 500
research papers on fish intelligence, proving that fish are
smart, that they can use tools, and that they have impressive
long-term memories and sophisticated social structures. The
introductory chapter said that fish are "steeped in social
intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation,
punishment and reconciliation … exhibiting stable cultural
traditions and cooperating to inspect predators and catch food."
With that in mind, my hope is that each of us questions what
criteria we use to determine the value of an animal’s life. To
determine who deserves to be spared pain, to determine who has a
right to live free from harm, free from suffering, free from
premature and unnecessary death.
May our hearts be large enough to include
not only those with whom we can identify, with whom we can
communicate. May our compassion be unbiased enough to embrace
those who don’t look us, those who don’t sound like us. May we
be as fascinated by our differences as we are consoled by our
similarities. We don’t need to travel to other planets to find
interesting, exotic, different life forms. They exist right
here, right now, on the earth and in the sea. We would recognize
them - if we could just get the way long enough to look through
a different lens, a broader lens.
- Colleen Patrick-Goudreau -
CompassionateCooks.com
