The Humane League
Around the world, farm-raised salmon now vastly outnumber salmon in the wild. Responsible for the suffering of billions of fish, salmon farms wreak havoc—not only on the fish they hold captive but also on the natural ecosystems surrounding them.
Today, the vast majority of salmon raised for food come from intensive farms that cause untold suffering—just like factory farms on land. Crowded into dense pens, hundreds of thousands of salmon spend their short lives in total captivity, all to feed an unsustainable demand for seafood. The open ocean stretches out before these beautiful fish, but long swathes of netting keep them from swimming to freedom. In the wild, salmon make incredible journeys, over many years, back to their birthplaces upstream, where they give life to the next generation. But in the world of aquaculture, the life of a salmon is one only of confinement and slaughter.
Billions of land animals are raised and killed for food each year. These intelligent, sensitive beings spend the entirety of their short lives in complete confinement. Yet our industrial food system extends well beyond the windowless sheds and barren fields that house cows, pigs, and chickens. Beneath the surface of the ocean, billions more marine animals are languishing in aquatic farms, underwater and—for the most part—unseen.
Sentient Institute estimates that, on average, 110 billion aquatic animals are raised and killed on underwater farms each year. Of these, salmon are among the most widely farmed. Tragically, the majority of the world’s salmon now reside on off-shore farms, where they face daily stress, pain, and misery.
Although the seafood industry treats its fish as a countless mass, each one is a sentient, sensitive individual. On an aquatic farm, a salmon can’t express her natural instincts to bond with her school and migrate from freshwater pools to the ocean and back again. Closely monitored and controlled her entire life, all she can do to pass the time is swim through filthy water in endless circles. Unlike her wild counterpart, she’s trapped in a barren cage and destined for slaughter.
What is Farm-Raised Salmon?
If you buy farm-raised salmon at the supermarket, you’re buying a fish that’s spent his entire life on an aquaculture farm with hundreds of thousands of other salmon. Filthy and crowded, these fish farms are just as heartbreaking as industrial farms on land.
Like baby cows and chickens born into industrial agriculture, farm-raised salmon will never know freedom. In the wild, salmon migrate huge distances as they swim from the stream where they were born to the wide, open sea. After spending as many as five years in the vast ocean, traveling thousands of miles, salmon then, incredibly, return to the freshwater streams where they were born in order to reproduce. Salmon bred for aquaculture, by contrast, were not born in flowing streams but in cost-effective hatcheries designed to produce as many fish as possible. And once they’re born, they’ll never leave the confines of their pen—until it’s time for slaughter.
How Are Salmon Farmed?
Salmon are typically raised in sea pens, though some may be raised in tanks. Politico reported in 2020 that one massive tank in Florida is “on track to become the world’s biggest land-based fish farm over the next decade, eventually producing a billion meals a year on a campus the size of the Mall of America.” In both cases, farm-raised salmon spend their whole lives in confinement, never to explore the open ocean that extends beyond the boundaries of their enclosures.
Farmed fish begin their short lives at freshwater hatcheries before enduring the trauma of transport to the pens where they’ll live out the rest of their days. Because these pens are so densely packed, salmon often endure illness, skin lesions from parasites, and violent handling by workers.
Once they reach “market weight,” the salmon are killed on-site at the fish farm or elsewhere at a slaughter plant. Prior to death, the salmon are stunned in a variety of ways, which include “chilling” the fish on ice, subjecting the fish to carbon dioxide gas, shocking the animals with electric currents, and battering the fish on the head. Shockingly, the American Veterinary Medical Association classifies these methods as standard practice.
Wild salmon commonly live to be four or five years old, and sometimes even seven. But farm-raised salmon often live for just two years, their lives cut short by the greed of industrial aquaculture. From birth to death, these salmon receive little to no protection—despite the fact that they’re killed in astonishing numbers. Their lives as farm-raised fish are miserable, unnatural, and largely invisible.
Farm-Raised Versus Wild-Caught Salmon
Farm-raised salmon outnumber wild-caught salmon by multiple orders of magnitude. In Norway, for example, there are roughly 400 million fish in farms at any given moment—and only 500,000 wild fish.
Like chickens raised for meat, farmed salmon are selectively bred over multiple generations to grow extremely fast. The Guardian notes, however, that farmed salmon are extremely fast-growing—but “they only grow for a short time and never achieve the size of the more slow-growing wild salmon.” Sadly, moreover, their diets often consist of wild-caught fish. According to one report, nearly one-fifth of the world’s wild-caught fish are caught just to feed farm-raised fish. The cruelty of aquaculture is matched only by its unsustainability. “Fish farming currently creates as many problems as it solves,” the Guardian observes.
Is Farm-Raised Salmon Bad for You?
The seafood industry praises salmon for its health benefits: high in protein, loaded with omega-3 fatty acids, rich with vitamin D. But the truth is more complicated.
With more calories, twice the fat content, and over 20% more saturated fat, farm-raised salmon is far less healthy than its wild-caught counterpart.
Moreover, much of the salmon that people consume today is loaded with contaminants that have no place on our plates.
Antibiotics
With so many salmon living in such close quarters, the waters of fish farms are putrid, depleted, and absolutely filthy with waste—creating the perfect breeding ground for disease. Rather than improve the conditions of these sickening pens, fish farmers prefer to treat their salmon with routine rounds of antibiotics.
Though antibiotics might prevent some illnesses, research shows that these drugs also harm fish’s immune systems and cause cellular damage. To make matters worse, rampant use of antibiotics also poses risks to both human and environmental health. Researchers have long warned that fish farming can weaken the antibiotics used to treat humans and threaten the wild fish who live nearby.
Cancer-causing Chemicals
If you eat farmed salmon, you could be consuming chemicals linked to cancer: polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
The US banned PCBs in 1979, but remnants still exist in aquatic food chains. According to the Mayo Clinic, fish are a “major dietary source of PCBs.” Lab tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group revealed that farm-raised salmon in particular are “likely the most PCB-contaminated protein source in the U.S. food supply,” because the fishmeal they eat often contains PCBs.
Mercury and Other Trace Metals
While salmon contains relatively low levels of mercury compared to other species, both farm-raised and wild-caught salmon aren’t completely mercury-free.
Farm-raised salmon also contain other dangerous metals. For example, one study by researchers at Cornell University and University at Albany found “significantly higher” levels of organic arsenic in farmed salmon than in their wild relatives.
Risky Pollutants
When it comes to raising salmon for food, the health risks outweigh the benefits. A 2004 global study.) of salmon from farms in northern Europe, North America, and Chile concluded that the levels of pollutants were “significantly higher” in aquaculture-raised fish than in their wild counterparts. The researchers cautioned that “consumption of farmed Atlantic salmon may pose health risks that detract from the beneficial effects of fish consumption.”
Plastic also regularly shows up in farm-raised salmon. We tend to think of plastic pollution in terms of its devastating effects on wild marine life: turtles caught in soda can rings, seabirds choking on garbage bags. Yet, in 2020, researchers found microplastics in over half of the farmed salmon they studied, compared to only “a small number” of wild salmon.
Worms and Lice
Unfortunately, farm-raised salmon sometimes suffer from parasitic worms—which then end up on dinner plates. “Experts say the worms are unwittingly eaten by plenty of seafood lovers,” CBC reports.
Farmed fish also suffer from sea lice. 20% of farmed salmon in Norway die each year due to parasites, and the main problem is lice. Sea lice feed on fish blood and skin, and the overcrowded conditions on fish farms create an environment teeming with sea lice. Infected fish develop skin lesions, and severe outbreaks spread easily among farmed fish, causing many to die.
Farms often attempt to control sea lice infestations with the use of toxic chemicals. The Guardian reported in 2017 that antibiotics and pesticides used to combat infestations left Scottish waters severely polluted.
Why is Farm-Raised Salmon Bad for the Environment?
Farm-raised salmon puts the health of our planet at risk.
Contamination
The filthy farms that raise fish don’t exist in a vacuum. They contaminate the waters around them.
In 2017, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) studied the environmental impacts of Chilean salmon farms. The researchers reported: “The cages for the medium and larger fish leak excrement, food residue, and other substances into the country's seas and coastal waters. The companies also draw water for their hatcheries from some of the extremely clean, natural rivers. They pump it through the tanks for the young salmon before reintroducing it to the river further downstream.” In short, the waste from these farms empties into the surrounding waters.
Escapes
Although most farmed salmon never escape their heartbreaking fate, some do manage to slip past their nets—but when they do, they disrupt the surrounding ecosystems.
According to NPR, an “environmental nightmare” unfolded in 2017, when thousands of Atlantic salmon escaped an aquaculture farm in Washington state, swimming into the waters off the San Juan Islands. While they swam to freedom, they brought with them pollution, disease, and parasites that threatened wild populations.
Pollution
Our oceans are already overburdened with pollution: garbage, plastics, and more—even noise pollution. Fish farms are part of the problem.
Every metric ton of farmed salmon produces a lot of waste—including 92.6 to145.5 pounds of nitrogen waste and 15.9 to 23.1 pounds of phosphorus waste. Together, these chemical elements can unleash harmful algal blooms, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The evidence says it’s simply not worth it: “Run-off from marine salmon farms is more expensive to clean up than the production of salmon is worth… This is quite shocking considering the massive scale we are producing salmon on. The only way the industry can persist is by ignoring the pollution they are causing.”
Sea Lice
Sea lice harm farm-raised salmon, but their devastation goes much further than that. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says that wild salmon who live close to aquaculture farms are 73 times more likely to suffer from “lethal sea lice”—and that a fish farm can trigger a sea lice infestation in waters as far as 40 miles away. The toll is deadly. Lice infestations that started on salmon farms can easily kill wild fish.
And the damage doesn’t stop there. Chemicals used to treat lice on salmon farms often leak into the surrounding ecosystems. Research shows that some lice actually develop resistance to the pesticides used to kill them—and some make it out of the farms and into the open ocean, free to spread unchecked in the wild.
Transfer of Disease
Diseases often move from fish farms to wild populations via escaped fish. But escape isn’t the only way that disease spreads. The filth of aquaculture farms is potent enough to harm the surrounding environment on its own.
As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) explains, “When finfish aquaculture operations are in the marine environment, water moves freely between farms and the ocean. Risks include the amplification and transmission of disease from farmed to wild fish, and the introduction of nonnative pathogens and parasites when fish are transported.”
Is Farm-Raised Salmon Ethical?
Salmon farming poses health risks, raises environmental concerns, and—on top of it all—creates serious ethical problems for a highly lucrative industry.
Aquaculture farms raise millions of salmon every year. But they pay little attention to the welfare of these marine animals. In a 2021 study, researchers called for immediate action to “create policies that minimize welfare risks.” The costs to public health and the environment are clear. The costs to the animals themselves are far less so.
Investigations of these factory farms have found salmon living in filthy water, covered in sea lice, suffering from wounds, and dead in their enclosures. Other investigations have revealed fish violently removed from the water, tossed around, and slammed on the ground.
In 2019, an estimated 2.6 million salmon died in pens at Northern Harvest Sea Farms in Norway after spending too long in warm water. Following their cruel death, the farmers dumped their bodies into the open ocean, polluting the surrounding waters.
What You Can Do
Fish don’t have fur or feathers, but they can feel pain. And they can suffer.
Together, we’re building a world where no salmon is forced to live out her days on an industrial farm, away from the oceans and rivers where her wild relatives roam. Take action with us—for the fish and for the animals.
