Planning tonight’s dinner? Don’t eat Atlantic salmon before reading this

In the past few weeks, the Tasmanian salmon industry has been in the headlines. More than a million fish are reported to have died in what appears to be an outbreak of a bacterial disease. In February alone, more than 5500 tonnes of dead fish were dumped at southern Tasmanian waste facilities.

Drone footage has shown dead fish rotting inside the huge nets in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. On the pristine beaches nearby, chunks of rotting fish are washing up, along with fatty lumps that the industry says is fish oil, which is fed to the salmon.

Each Australian consumes about two kilograms of salmon a year. Credit: Alana Dimou

The industry has responded, as it has done to past outbreaks, by putting antibiotics into the feed given to the fish – but as the fish farms are in the ocean, some of these antibiotics will enter the marine ecological systems in which the confined salmon are placed.

These environmental concerns would be enough reason to avoid farmed Tasmanian salmon already – which for most Australians means avoiding Atlantic salmon altogether, since 90 per cent of the Atlantic salmon sold in Australia is farmed Tasmanian salmon. Each Australian consumes more than two kilograms of Atlantic salmon a year on average, from an industry worth more than $1 billion.

Some people are under the illusion that farmed salmon is a sustainable industry. But salmon are carnivorous fish, and like all factory-farmed animals, they need to be fed much more food than they yield.

Behind the salmon farms are trawlers that scoop vast numbers of less valuable fish from the ocean. Their catch is ground up and turned into fish oil or fishmeal and fed to the salmon. On average, to grow one salmon to a market weight of four kilograms requires 147 fish to be killed. That contributes to overfishing of the oceans and inflicts painful deaths on a huge number of fish.

But worse is to come. The Bob Brown Foundation flew drones over the salmon farms and captured footage showing live salmon being pumped out of the nets along with dead salmon, and sealed into plastic tubs to be taken to waste facilities. Workers made no efforts to retrieve the live fish, either to return them to the nets or to kill them humanely. The salmon must have died slowly, from suffocation.

Luke Martin, chief executive of Salmon Tasmania, said dumping live fish in waste facilities “does not represent normal operations procedures, or the animal welfare standards expected of the industry”. Huon Aquaculture, the Tasmanian salmon corporation that owned the fish sealed into the tubs, said it was launching a “full investigation”.

“Aquaculture” is a euphemism for the underwater factory farming of fish. Like most factory farming of birds and mammals, the Tasmanian salmon factory farms are owned by large corporations, and, like any factory, the objective is to produce the commodity at the lowest possible price. Salmon, like chickens and pigs in factory farms on land, are crowded together, and their natural instincts to move freely in the ocean are thwarted. If the individual sentient beings have a relatively low commercial value – like chickens and fish – the severity and quantity of the suffering is relevant only to the extent that it will affect productivity. High mortality, often due to overcrowding, is accepted as long as enough of the commodities survive to yield a greater total return on the capital invested.

When disease strikes and the animals have to be disposed of, their commercial value is too low to justify the extra labour costs that would be required to kill them humanely.

The first edition of Animal Liberation, the book I wrote that many consider to be the animal liberation movement’s founding philosophical statement, was published in 1975, so I have been observing factory farming for more than 50 years. I have watched scores of videos showing the appalling treatment of animals on factory farms. The videos capture only the tiny visible tip of an immense iceberg.

Often these videos get a strong enough negative response for the corporate owner or a government agency to announce there will be an investigation. Sometimes there really is a genuine investigation, and it leads to workers being dismissed, or, rarely, convicted of offences under anti-cruelty legislation. But the problems don’t go away when workers are sacked or punished because the problem isn’t the workers: it is the system of treating animals as commodities and producing them to make a profit.

Half a century of seeing the repeated cycle of video exposure of cruelty, investigation and vows to change has convinced me that as long as consumers buy the commodities produced by these farms, the suffering will continue, mostly unseen, and often on a scale that we struggle to comprehend. The problem will be solved only when consumers realise it is their dollars that are keeping these vile industries going and cease to buy their products.

Peter Singer is Emeritus Professor of bioethics at Princeton University and founder of the non-profit organisation The Life You Can Save.

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