Fish & Aquaculture
Fish:TheTrillionForgotten
Fish are the most numerous vertebrates killed for food on earth — by an order of magnitude. They feel pain. They have memory. And the way we kill them is the cruelest part of the food system.
Sentience
Yes, Fish Feel Pain
Estimates from FishCount and the Animal Welfare Institute put the number of fish killed for food each year between 1 and 2.7 trillion. That is roughly a hundred times the number of all land animals slaughtered combined. Most are not counted in tonnes, not individuals, because the industry treats them as a yield rather than a population.
The scientific consensus on fish sentience is no longer contested. The American Veterinary Medical Association, the British Veterinary Association, and a 2021 review commissioned by the UK government all confirm that fish — and cephalopods like octopuses and squid — feel pain, experience stress, and have the neural complexity to suffer.
Fish are also among the longest-suffering animals in any food system. Captured fish typically die of asphyxiation on deck (10–60 minutes), or have their gills cut and bleed out conscious. Farmed salmon are often killed by ice slurry, which prolongs consciousness rather than ending it.
Aquaculture
The Underwater Factory Farm
Roughly half of the seafood eaten worldwide now comes from farms — most notably salmon, trout, sea bream, sea bass, tilapia, shrimp and pangasius. Salmon cages can hold tens of thousands of fish at densities equivalent to one bathtub of water per salmon. Sea-lice infestations are routine; mortality rates of 15–25% before slaughter are common in Norwegian and Scottish salmon farms.
Shrimp aquaculture has driven the destruction of roughly a third of the world's mangroves — ecosystems that store more carbon per hectare than rainforest and that buffer coastal communities from storms.
Fish are the largest forgotten population in our food system. Their suffering is a hundred times the scale of all land farming combined.
Wild catch
Bycatch and the Empty Sea
For every kilogram of shrimp trawled, up to 10 kilograms of other marine life is killed as bycatch and discarded. Industrial trawlers drag heavy chains across the seafloor, destroying coral, sponges and centuries-old habitat that does not grow back within a human lifetime. The UN FAO classifies a third of global fish stocks as overfished and another 60% as fished at biological capacity.
The choice between 'wild' and 'farmed' is not a welfare choice — it is a choice between two systems that share the same outcome: enormous numbers of sentient animals killed inefficiently and unsustainably.
Fish & Aquaculture
Leave the ocean alone. There are better proteins.
Fish are also among the longest-suffering animals in any food system. Captured fish typically die of asphyxiation on deck (10–60 minutes), or have their gills cut and bleed out conscious. Farmed salmon are often killed by ice slurry, which prolongs consciousness rather than ending it.
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