Perils of Fast-Growing Aquaculture Industry

We learn,
"The Bush administration has vowed to quintuple the yield of aquaculture -- the fastest-growing sector of U.S. agriculture, with $1 billion in annual sales -- by 2025. That same year, forecasts say, half the fish consumed worldwide will be farm-raised instead of wild-caught."

The article makes it clear that fish farming is highly controversial and discusses some of the issues:

"Much of the controversy has focused on the fish feces and excess food that build up beneath the floating net pens and can form bacteria mats on the sea floor that harm marine life. Many scientists say these problems can be reversed by rotating the pens and allowing some to lie fallow, and most growers now use closer monitoring to reduce excess feeding. But salmon waste off the British Columbia coast still releases as much excess nitrogen as sewage from a city of 250,000, according to some estimates....

"Many commercial fishermen are more worried about two other factors: the spread of disease that comes when animals are crowded together and the use of chemicals to combat these illnesses. In Maine, Canada and elsewhere, farmed fish have passed sea lice, which eat salmon flesh, to their wild counterparts. Infectious salmon anemia, a lethal disease first discovered in Norway in 1984, has spread globally, prompting one Maine fish farm to kill more than 1.5 million fish in 2002 to try to contain the infection.

"Escaped salmon, which compete for natural resources with other fish and can sometimes interbreed with their wild counterparts, pose another potential risk. Fred Whoriskey, who heads the research staff at the Atlantic Salmon Federation and works on saving the few thousand wild salmon that still live in North American waters, found more than eight times as many escaped fish farm salmon as wild salmon in New Brunswick's Magaguadavic River last year. "

Human health issues are also noted:

"The recent debate about health risks associated with farm salmon -- one 2004 study published in the journal Science concluded that raised salmon had such elevated levels of PCBs, dioxin and other cancer-causing contaminants that consumers should limit themselves to one eight-ounce portion a month -- has also made aquaculture controversial. Industry officials counter that the health benefits of eating salmon, rich in omega-3, far outweigh any cancer risks, and they have conducted recent studies showing PCB levels in farm salmon that are comparable to those in wild fish."

(Note: Flaxseed is extremely high in Omega-3 fatty acids and comes with no PCB driven cancer risks.)

You can read the whole article on line at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31159-2005Jan23.html
OR http://tinyurl.com/5m3at

It presents a great opportunity for letters to the editor singing the praises of plant based diets. And since animal welfare issues are not addressed in the story, letters to the editor might cover that area. Many people comfortable with eating animals but not with supporting the horror of factory farming (Check out http://www.FactoryFarming.com if you don't know much about that issue) have chosen to eat fish, feeling comforted to know that at least they were free until their final day. Environmental concerns, as our oceans are stripped bare, or concerns for sea mammals and reptiles killed en masse by the fishing industry, might have infringed on the comfort; the knowledge that the fishing industry is going the way of every other animal farming industry, with animals held captive in abusive conditions from birth till death, should do so even more. A great resource on that issue is http://www.FishingHurts.com

The Washington Post takes letters at: letters [at] Washpost.com and instructs:

"Letters must be exclusive to The Washington Post, and must include the writer's home address and home and business telephone numbers. Because of space limitations, those published are subject to abridgment."

I send thanks to Paul Shapiro of the superb group Compassion Over Killing ( http://www.COK.net ) for making sure we saw this.

Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. If you reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)