Turning Fish Into an Industrialized Product Has Bad Consequences. Who Could Guess!
By A deadly salmon virus is likely to decimate wild stocks in coming decades. This highly contagious virus, which developed in the salmon farms of Norway, has infected British Columbia wild salmon that have had contact with farm-raised fish.
When we turn animals into industrialized products, very bad things happen. Sometime those consequences can be managed to the extent that it only causes animals great pain and suffering but doesn’t directly affect humans, such as the effects of a grain-based diet on cows. With more wild species, the problems are much harder to manage, such as with the decline of honeybees and now, likely salmon:
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infectious salmon anemia virus morphed from a benign form in nature into a “novel virulent strain” when salmon stocks entered Norway’s densely packed salmon farms. Rather than getting picked off by a predator, a sick fish would undergo a slow death in a crowded pen, shedding virus particles.
Fish farming is an unsustainable industry that we don’t worry too much about because we never see it. But human history of eating fish is about to come to an end. Many animals are being fished to near extinction, others that have proven farmable in the past are showing that this is hard to sustain over a long period of time.