Pescetarians Kill More Animals

For one thing, scientists have amassed evidence over the past 20 years that fish are sentient — that they feel pain, experience emotions, and engage in complex social behavior that we once thought was limited to humans and land animals — upending decades of received wisdom that they don’t matter morally because they can’t really suffer.

Then there’s the question of numbers. Even if you’re less confident that fish can suffer like as pigs or cows, or you just have less empathy for them, keep in mind that you typically have to eat many more individual fish to get an equivalent serving of food. An average farmed salmon yields just under four-and-a-half pounds of meat. That’s over 30 times less meat than a single pig and over 100 times less than a cow. Salmon and chickens produce a similar amount of meat per animal, and both experience intense suffering on industrial farms, but farmed salmon live roughly 26 times longer than chickens before reaching slaughter weight, which means 26-fold more time spent in pain. And unlike farmed land animals, lots of the fish we eat are carnivorous, so they eat a huge number of bait fish before they make it to your plate, which only adds to the pescetarian’s moral bill.

When I went pescetarian, I started eating around two pounds of salmon a week, the equivalent of one to two entire Atlantic salmon every month. The typical farmed salmon is fed 147 fish over the course of their short lives — which meant that I was responsible for somewhere between 1,700 and 3,500 fish deaths per year from eating salmon alone. By comparison, the typical American eats around 25 land animals in total per year (based on data from a decade ago, but current figures are similar).

So it’s little surprise that, according to one estimate, humans catch or farm at least 840 billion to 2.5 trillion fish each year — at least 11 times the combined number of cows, chickens, and pigs slaughtered globally, even though seafood makes up just 17 percent of the world’s animal protein intake. 

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Given the overwhelming evidence for fish sentience, the ethically motivated eater can rely on neither. And the distinction between farmed and wild-caught begins to break down when you consider the close relationship between commercial fishing and aquaculture, also known as fish factory farming. Over 90 percent of all fish humans slaughter are wild-caught, but about half of those are eaten not by humans but processed into fishmeal (mostly eaten by farmed fish and crustaceans) to accommodate the rapidly growing fish farming industry. A recent study estimated that the number of fish farmed globally grew ninefold in the last three decades, up to 124 billion in 2019.

Raising fish in confined conditions far different from their natural environments presents severe ethical problems, to say the least. Farmed fish suffer from overcrowding, disease, and the pain of being forced to grow rapidly. They experience significantly higher mortality rates than those of farmed land animals, while diseases that spread in dense fish farms also threaten wild marine populations.

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Human taste buds have no limits!