The Trump administration is keen to do to fish what has been done to chickens – mass-produce them on an industrial scale to accelerate the US’s output of seafood.
But this “chickenification” of fish may come at a hefty cost to the environment and to the fish themselves, as a new undercover video at one of the country’s leading fish farms has highlighted.
A major seafood company is again under investigation over allegations of animal abuse after a second undercover video taken at a salmon breeding farm in Maine appeared to show cruel treatment of fish and environmentally harmful practices.
The covert video taken by the Animal Outlook activist group, which it sent to the Guardian, shows staff at the Cooke Aquaculture salmon hatchery in Bingham, Maine, clubbing fish with metal poles, aiming kicks at them as they writhe on the ground and in one instance cutting into a living fish. Deformities and fungal infections were also prevalent in the fish, according to Animal Outlook.
Employees told the undercover activist that they give the fish feed contaminated by rats, have mistakenly let penned fish escape into surrounding wild waterways and that they kill thousands of fish because they have produced too many of them.
“Unfortunately I don’t think the company is in it for the fish health side, they just want fish production,” one worker states on the video.
The video, shot between September and December last year by an activist who worked as a hatchery technician, is the second such undercover recording taken by Animal Outlook at the same facility. In 2019, a similar video shot undercover by the group showed deformed salmon thrown into plastic containers where they suffocated.
“Granted, we did a lot of stuff we weren’t supposed to fucking do,” one employee said on the latest video about the previous exposé. The staff member recounts how he was shown on the first video throwing fish like basketballs while shouting “Kobe” and how he wanted to send a horse’s tongue to the “animal activist bitch” who went undercover at the facility.
The video shows mistreatment “about bad as it gets”, said Jareb Gleckel, director of legal advocacy at Animal Outlook. “The facility has no oversight,” he added. “Seven years after the first investigation, this is a systemic issue.”
Jena Questen, former president of the World Aquatic Veterinary Medical Association, wrote in an affidavit, in support of Animal Outlook’s complaint to regulators, that footage showed “inhumane” treatment of fish left to die via asphyxiation or being bludgeoned without being stunned first.
The fish would probably “continue to experience unnecessary and avoidable suffering until substantial corrective measures are implemented”, she added.
A spokesman for Cooke Aquaculture, a Canadian firm headquartered in New Brunswick, declined to comment when contacted by the Guardian about the video.
The state regulator, Maine’s department of agriculture, conservation and forestry, said it had opened an investigation and interviewed Animal Outlook, which has requested animal cruelty charges be laid against Cooke.
The salmon raised at Cooke’s Bingham hatchery ultimately are turned into packaged salmon sold under the brand name True North, a product that carries certification from the third-party Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) program.
“We take allegations against BAP-certified facilities very seriously,” a spokeswoman for the certification body said. “Based on what has been brought to our attention, our program integrity team has opened an investigation into this facility.”
The allegations raise broader questions about the growth of the $4bn US aquaculture industry, which harvests eggs and sperm from mature fish to produce animals that are raised in controlled environments in land-based circular ponds, cages or pens in the sea or a combination of locations.
There are about 3,500 aquaculture farms across the US, centred on the west coast, the Gulf of Mexico coast and in Maine. Globally, this industry has soared, with the world now getting more of its seafood from aquaculture than from wild-caught means.
In the US, the Trump administration is aiming to supersize fish farming, pointing out that while demand for seafood has grown among Americans, 80% of what’s consumed in the country comes from other countries, primarily Canada, Chile, India and Indonesia.
Last month, Trump’s US Department of Agriculture launched the first national office of seafood, with the aim of sweeping aside regulations to help allow a boom in aquaculture across a number of identified “opportunity areas” covering thousands of acres off the coasts of Alaska and California and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The office will provide “new opportunities, stronger support, and a brighter future for the seafood industry”, according to Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture.
The Trump administration’s policies will spur an “enormous expansion” in salmon hatcheries like the one operated by Cooke, according to Ben Williamson, executive director of Animal Outlook. “It’s going to get the supersize treatment, like the chicken boom in the 1950s,” he said. “That is what’s about to happen to fish in the US.”
Animal welfare regulations vary between states, with Washington state making a landmark decision last year to ban commercial net pen aquaculture. A USDA spokesperson said that aquaculture “is one of the most environmentally efficient ways to produce animal protein, having feed efficiencies comparable to poultry and minimal use of freshwater resources”.
“The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader,” the spokesperson added. “We aim to significantly reduce or eliminate the seafood trade deficit with increased domestic aquaculture production and increased sales of United States seafood products, and by leveling the playing field for our producers to give them greater access to markets.”
But critics argue that while aquaculture can reduce pressure on overfished wild stocks of fish, it can pose severe environmental problems of its own. Diseases and parasites can sweep through the dense schools of the farmed fish, which can spread to wild populations. Chemicals used in feeds and medications can also affect marine ecosystems, while escaped fish alter the composition of their wild counterparts.
“There are escapes, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution affecting the ecology, there’s dead zones developing underneath open net pens, impacts on fishermen – that’s why we are seeing resistance from states and local groups,” said Williamson.
“Even if you take out all the willful animal cruelty, keeping that many fish in captivity is not a good life and therefore it’s cruel.”
Williamson said that beyond a crackdown on fish farms that flout regulations he would like to see “people shift their protein consumption away from animal protein towards plant-based. We know that specifically carnivore fish is incredibly inefficient when it comes to protein conversion.”