I came across this website and their report recently and thought some of the arguments are interesting.
This report details the welfare of fish in commercial fishing. According to the report 970 – 2,740 billion individual fish are caught each year compared to the farmed 3 billion mammals and 57 billion birds reported by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN in 2008.
Considerable suffering is caused to wild-caught fish during capture, landing and subsequent processing. Fish are likely to experience fear, pain and distress as they are, for example:
- • pursued to exhaustion by nets
- • crushed under the weight of other fish in trawl nets
- • raised from deep water and suffer decompression effects e.g. burst swim bladders
- • snared in gill nets
- • confined in constricted seine nets
- • spiked with hooks (gaffed) to bring them aboard
- • caught on hooks, often for hours or days
- • thrown live to tuna as bait
- • impaled live on hooks as bait
Available to be downloaded from http://fishcount.org.uk
