Facts and figures that mean we should boycott battery-farmed salmon industry

As a biologist, if I were simply to tell you the damning facts about salmon farming’s harmful impacts on the marine environment, wild salmon, coastal communities in the third world, farmed fish wellbeing and the doubtful food safety of farmed salmon, would you stop eating it? l Marine pollution: 1,000 tonnes annually of untreated, pesticide-lacedfishexcrement per standard net-cage fish farm; l Excess pesticides killing untargeted marine organisms while targeted pests and diseases thrive; l Population declines of wild wrasse and lumpfish, trapped for the less-than-effective “eco-friendly biological control” of sea lice, and consequent ecosystem disruption; l More than 8 million infested, ulcerated, deformed, mortally sick and dead salmon thrown away in 2017; l Convoys of trucks loaded with stinking, rotting salmon carcases travelling from all along the mainland coast and islands of Western Scotland to rendering plants in the south; l Wild salmon and sea trout on the brink of extinction due to fish farm-generated epidemics of flesh-grazing sea lice and mortal diseases; l Wild sea fish and human population declines in third world countries where salmon feed is manufactured; l Analysis showing farmed salmon to be the most potentially toxic food in the supermarket.

If you still need persuading, a recent Scottish Government inquiry and subsequent debate entirely vindicated the above arguments we objectors have been positing for years. We should all show our dissatisfaction with the industry that battery-farms salmon by overt abstention in supermarkets and restaurants, making our refusal obvious, and explaining why.

DR JAMES MERRYWEATHER Salmon Aquaculture Reform

Network, Auchtertyre, Kyle of Lochalsh