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Commercial Fishing: A Firsthand Account
They Die Slowly …
by Dawn Carr
 As the director
of PETA’s U.K. office, I’ll stand up for any animal
who needs help—from the tiniest mouse to the mightiest
elephant. But anyone who knows me will tell you that I have
a soft spot in my heart for fish. Before I came to England,
my coworkers at PETA’s headquarters in the U.S. dubbed
me “Miss Fish” because of my efforts to let others
know how fish suffer when hooked for fun or food. So, when
a filmmaker from Norway’s TV2 contacted me about producing
a documentary about PETA’s Anti-Fishing Campaign, I
jumped at the chance to raise awareness about the horrors
that these beautiful creatures endure on the journey from
sea to supermarket. The rest was torture …
I Had to Watch Them Twitch and Gasp
The documentary crew wanted to film me aboard a commercial
fishing boat in Norway, so we traveled to Mehamn, on the northern
tip of the country, well into the frigid Arctic. I was expecting
to go out on a large trawler, but it turned out to be a tiny
two-person gill netter, which is even worse—though it
hardly seems possible—for the fish who are caught. On
a trawler or purse seiner, like the one you see here, fish
are hauled up in masses and dumped onto the deck. These boats
use huge nets, some of which stretch for miles, that indiscriminately
swallow up everything—and everyone—in their paths.
Fish come out of the nets with their flanks scraped completely
raw from being forced to rub against rocks, debris and other
fish trapped in the net with them. But a gill netter is even
worse for the fish. Every fish caught is entangled in the
net, and the fish come aboard one by one as the net is reeled
in. It’s a more invasive process, a more personal one,
and each and every fish is handled by the workers. I watched
as cod after cod was violently extracted from the net—hundreds
of fish squeezed and torn out of the tangle, the net slicing
into their bodies. “It will soon be over,” I silently
told them—and myself.
I Was Covered in Vomit
A few fish were considered too small to take and were tossed
back into the sea. “That fish will not survive,”
I told Bjorn, the ship’s captain, and he said, “Oh,
the birds will take care of it.” From the net, the fish
were roughly tossed into a metal bin, landing with a thud.
Some were still thrashing, some were too tired; many were
vomiting up their guts, their eyes bulging from the pressure
change. Some of these fish may have been struggling in the
nets for up to 24 hours. After a few minutes, their gill arches
were slit and they were thrown into the next bin, where they
twitched and gasped, slowly bleeding to death. Later, the
fish were gutted and beheaded. The sea was very rough for
half the day, and it was extremely cold—I was bundled
up in a huge Arctic suit, with just my face peeking out. But
the absolute worst thing for me, physically, was the overwhelming
stench of fish vomit. It was not long before I was covered
with fish blood, vomit and guts.
Fish Overboard
The magazine that I read on my flight to Mehamn had an article
about the fishing industry in Norway, boasting about how it
uses all parts of the cod. On the boat I was on, the head
and viscera—half of the dead animal—were thrown
overboard. Such waste is not unusual. Every year, commercial
fishers dump more than 20 million tons of nontargeted fish
alone—most of them dead or dying—back into the
oceans; that’s one-fourth of all the fish caught worldwide.
This figure doesn’t even take into account the other
hapless animals—turtles, sea birds, seals—who
are unfortunate enough to be caught in the boats’ massive
nets. And for what? So many beautiful, thinking, feeling animals—who
value their lives as we value ours—needlessly killed
because we humans can’t seem to break our addiction
to the taste of flesh.
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