Category: Book Reviews

Humans eat a lot of salmon. Across the globe, we kill roughly 850 million of them every year for food. 70% of those salmon are not wild caught in some idyllic river in Alaska. Most of them are farm raised off the coast of Norway, Chile, Scotland, or Canada, using open-net pens. 

The point of Salmon Wars is to get us to see that the vast majority of those farms are disease-filled horror shows. It’s not easy to turn a once expensive delicacy into a cheap commodity. To do so, you need to throw all scruples out the window. Problems with farmed salmon include:

• The staggeringly high death rates. 15-20% of all farmed salmon die before making it to slaughter. Compare that with 5% for chickens and 3% for cows.
• The overuse of antibiotics, which can contribute to antibiotic resistance in humans.
• The ubiquitous sea lice infestations on farms also spread to wild salmon and crater their populations.
• The high levels of toxic man-made chemicals, like PCBs, found in farmed salmon.
• The wrecking of the ocean floor from accumulated fish poop. One measurement showed a 32 inch layer of feces beneath the open net pens.
• The mass die-offs on farms that can lead to oil spill like conditions in local waterways when millions of fish decompose.
• The devastation of certain types of small fish that are caught in huge numbers every year just to be fed to the farmed salmon.
• The fact that powerful political forces keep the whole industry humming along so a few giant multinationals can make huge profits.

To the end of convincing me that salmon farms are bad, the book succeeds beautifully. It’s a fascinating look at a sketchy industry that’s mostly hidden from view despite the fact that we slaughter more fish for food than any other group of animal.

I just wish the book had broadened its scope. The authors didn’t try to live up to their subtitle, which promises a look at “the dark underbelly of our favorite fish.” To me, the real dark underbelly is the sheer amount of pain and suffering we are inflicting on almost a billion sentient salmon every year. 

The big question is whether we should be doing any salmon farming at all. Even though the authors write that “it’s settled science that fish feel pain,” they are firmly in the camp that fishing is necessary to feed the world. They think we should mostly focus our energy on making more humane fish farms. I lean closer to the stance of Wolfram Heise, an anti-salmon farming conservationist from Chile who is quoted in the final chapter: “There is no right way of doing the wrong thing.”

So. Many. Trapped. Salmon. 

Through the miracles of modernization, salmon farmers have found a way to cram a hundred thousand salmon into a mesh net that is ninety-five feet in diameter and thirty-three feet deep. That’s the diameter of a ferris wheel and the depth of a three story building. It’s in these nylon cages that 100,000 powerful beings who are designed to swim across literal oceans spend their two years of life, listlessly going in circles. 

Covered in sea lice, with inadequate oxygen levels and water fouled beyond recognition by their own feces, the salmon are often driven to depression (they just float belly up with glazed over eyes) and cannibalism. The ones who give up are termed “drop outs.” 

Sometimes, due to poor maintenance and a buildup of scum and debris, the nets rupture. One of the big lawsuits discussed in the Salmon Wars involves a salmon farm in Puget Sound, WA, which suffers a broken net. Hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon pour out of the hole and into the open waters of the sound. 

Page after page is spent discussing the ramifications of this event, especially regarding the threat posed by the escaped fish. What kind of diseases are the farmed fish going to spread to the wild population? Are the offspring of a wild and a farmed salmon going to have a tough time surviving? What will happen if the farmed salmon outcompete the wild salmon for food? Could the genetic mutant hybrid fish eradicate the wild salmon altogether? 

All valid questions, yet I felt there was one missing. How freaking amazing must it have felt to be one of the farmed salmon that got to participate in this massive prison break? 

Imagine spending a year in water so filthy that sometimes human divers can’t see a foot in front of them. Imagine having nothing to do, being covered in parasites, being unable to escape the occasional tuna or shark that breaches the net. Just a prisoner with no way to express your inner Salmon-ness. Then, freedom! The ability to actually use your strong body to swim for more than 30 feet in any direction! If salmon leapt for joy like dolphins, or wept with joy like humans, it’s hard not to imagine these fish doing both. 

The authors write about these escaped salmon like their needs are irrelevant. Worse, they are treated like scoundrels. It’s like because the farmed fish had the misfortune of being born into a hellish world, they have no inherent dignity that needs to be respected. The freed salmon are referred to as “invaders”. It’s implied we should be cheering on the people who “declared an emergency and urged tribal fishermen to catch as many Atlantic salmon as possible to protect the native species from disease, interbreeding, and simply being eaten.” 

I know it’s beyond the scope of this book to get into a nuanced discussion about what it even means to call something “invasive”. But just a hint of that would have made the book a lot more interesting. 

I am obsessed with thinking about how much animals suffer, what drives people to treat them like machines, and what we can do to stop it. The authors, not so much. They wanted to highlight the health and environmental impacts of open net salmon farming. The overall goal was to tsk tsk the giant corrupt multinational salmon companies and glorify the little fisherman and activists trying to stop them. 

Interestingly, the one giant company that’s actually portrayed in a positive light is Patagonia, a company that funds anti salmon farming activism. Apparently this is out of the goodness of their hearts and not because they sell their own Patagonia branded wild caught salmon at $84 for six cans. 

Brief Looks at Animal Mistreatment

While Salmon Wars elides most of the hard conversations around the morality of farming sentient creatures for food, they do touch on animal welfare. For instance, they discuss some of the implications for the harsh methods used to try to rid the fish of the dreaded sea lice. One practice is called “thermolicing”, whereby salmon are pumped into special cages full of hot water. The industry touts the environmental benefits of this practice, as it doesn’t use chemicals. The tradeoff is that putting a Salmon in hot water goes about as well for them as you might imagine:

A study in the journal Veterinary and Animal Science concluded that thermal delousing damages the gills, eyes, brains, and possibly other organs of the fish. The scientists saw fish exhibiting pain and flight behavior when exposed to the hot water. The findings echoed a 2018 study in a Norwegian veterinary journal that found “the present use and technical solutions for thermal delousing are inadequate and likely to cause serious lesions in treated fish. Mowi [a large salmon farming company] disclosed that it lost 115,283 salmon in one year because of a thermolicer treatment.

It’s amazing to me that they’d even consider putting the fish in warm water, as a big reason salmon farms experience “die offs” is has to do with heat. Sometimes the water at a farm will get unseasonably warm and the fish will all swim deeper to try to cool off. They end up suffocating and crushing each other. One such event led to the deaths of 2.6 million fish on a single farm. 

Salmon Wars also spends a few pages on the brutal treatment of baby salmon at a hatchery in Bingham, Maine. We get a look at what life is like for these newborns via an undercover investigation. It’s gruesome. 

“Workers, their faces blurred out, provide a running commentary of callous indifference. Holding a damaged salmon, one worker says , “Fungus at his face away.” […] In another scene, workers pluck squirming smolts out of a shallow tank to inject them with antibiotics. One worker warns about the danger of tearing a gaping hole in the squirming fish. “It’s so rough,” says another worker. “Over the years you kinda get desensitized.”

This chapter ends with a couple paragraphs that show the authors are concerned about fish welfare, even if it’s not their biggest concern. We learn that even the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, famous for cozying up the fish industry, ran yet another study in which they determined that, yes, farmed salmon still hate hot water. 

Farmed salmon reacted with clear signs of pain when bathed in hot water to remove parasites: they swam wildly, shaking and colliding with the side of the containment vessel, and the erratic behavior persisted until the fish lay motionless on their sides.

The authors advocate for significantly improving fish welfare standards. They astutely point out that it makes no sense to have basic protections and laws for the treatment of land animals while completely ignoring fish. 

A Higher Welfare But Still Dystopian Fish Farming Future

One of the final chapters is spent analyzing a new kind of land-based salmon farm in Wisconsin. It’s praised for its breakthrough in figuring out how to “mimic nature by raising young salmon in freshwater and transferring them to saltwater tanks to grow to market size.” 

This innovation is allowing the farm to breed salmon that “reach a market size of ten to twelve pounds twice as fast as salmon raised in ocean pens.” I’m no fish welfare expert, but hearing that they are growing faster sets off alarm bells. One of the biggest problems of industrial chicken farming is that we’ve bred them to grow incredibly big very fast. It causes broken bones, heart problems, and painful heel fractures. Could these fast growing fish be experiencing similar traumas?

This fancy new farm doesn’t use as much wild caught fish for food as the ocean farms do. That’s good to hear. Instead they rely on “fish meal and oil from trimmings from a whitefish-processing plant in Oregon and with by-products from poultry.” Ah, the classic Salmon diet of unwanted industrial gristle.

They also mention how, at least with the land based facilities, the waste is not dumped directly in the ocean. In theory. The authors are giving some serious benefit of the doubt to the operators of large scale factory farms, who are infamous for telling the public one thing while dumping millions of pounds of waste in the rivers at the same time.

To be fair, these land based farms have a much lower mortality rate than the open net farms. They are cleaner and far better maintained. If I was a salmon, I guess I would prefer it? I know I’m supposed to care about incremental change, and we’re never going to snap our fingers and get rid of all factory farms and hold hands and sing songs and eat vegan coconut chickpea curry. Baby steps are still steps. I would never denigrate the work of all the people who are fighting for cage free systems for egg laying hens, for example. But I do think it matters that those cage free advocates are working toward an eventual future where factory farms are no longer a thing. The authors of Salmon Wars would appear to be happy if we kept our billion salmon per year habit, as long as those fish were raised in (probably) more humane land based systems. 

I also can’t shake the feeling that these new salmon farms feel, at a high level, dystopian and sad. The fish get better welfare in exchange for having even more of their naturalness stripped from them. Their tanks are cleaner but even smaller, and there is no chance of escape. Even if a tank broke, they would spill out onto an antiseptic lab floor, with no hope of making it to the open ocean.  Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on how you view the overall situation of farming animals for food. 

Farmed Salmon is Less Healthy Than You Think 

The one saving grace behind all the carnage is supposed to be that eating more salmon is good for our health. As much as it pains me to say it, that is likely the case for wild caught salmon. Farmed salmon is kinda gross though. 

The main thing Salmon Wars focuses on is the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls PCBs. Those are nasty man made chemicals that can’t be broken down by the body and are known to cause tons of health issues when consumed in high amounts. And some scientists say that even low level exposure can be detrimental. Farmed salmon eat highly concentrated feed that is full of PCBs and they store it in their fat. Because farmed salmon are fattier than those that are wild caught, they have much higher levels of PCBs. 

The other big problem is around antibiotic use. As is the case when a bunch of creatures are packed tightly together in an unnatural environment, disease runs rampant. The industry solution is to inundate the fish with antibiotics. The authors note that, “Chile, the second-largest producer of farmed salmon behind Norway and the largest salmon exporter to the United States, used 933,000 pounds of antibiotics in 2013.” Exposure to antibiotics in our food can cause the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria and make infections harder to fight in the future, among other health concerns. 

It’s not like eating farmed salmon is bad for everyone in every case. It’s just not necessarily the super healthy food the fish industry would like you to think it is.  

More Salmon Farming Facts I Found Interesting

Here are some other things I learned from the book that I think are worth remembering. 

• The number of Atlantic Salmon in the world has increased by 500% since 2005. If you’re the kind of person who thinks aggregate numbers are the key indicator of species health, you might argue that salmon are thriving. 
• Salmon are carnivores, and it puts pressure on ocean fishing stocks to catch all the fish to feed to them. I find this whole situation so bizarre. What if there were teams of people roving the streets hunting squirrels and rats to feed to snakes to satisfy a worldwide demand for snake meat? Catching all these small fish also affects the availability of a key protein source for people in lower income nations. This quote from the book makes you think: “You take the foods from the plates of people in West Africa to feed the people of Europe and the United States and other countries, said Dr. Ibrahima Cissé.” 
• 90% of the salmon consumed by North Americans is farmed Atlantic salmon 
• Just like with land based farms, the taxpayers often foot the bill when farmed fish die, via government programs that compensate the farms for losing fish. This happens even when fish die as a result of the farmer’s own negligence and cruelty. 
• As of this writing, “the USDA does not have standards for what constitutes organic salmon.” That doesn’t stop brands from using the label anyway.

Maybe we should just stop 

The authors spend 300+ pages spent diving into the unethical business practices of salmon farmers, the millions of fish that die because of unsanitary living conditions, the sea lice, the bleeding out of the eyes, the cannibalism, the swimming in their own feces, the murderous incursions into the salmon pens by dolphins and sharks, and the environmental and health impacts that come about from our love of farmed salmon. After all that, instead of only advocating for better farming practices, it’s a little surprising that they wouldn’t question the whole sordid business of eating salmon altogether. 

The authors take it for granted that we should be farming these creatures to begin with, and with that decision I think Salmon Wars misses an opportunity to make a more impactful point. Still, it was a fascinating book and I appreciate the authors commitment to giving us a glimpse inside a world that the major industry players would very much like to remain hidden.