The Right Way to Kill a Fish
"Cows have to be stunned before slaughter. Why doesn’t our finned fare?
When, in 2016, the F/V Blue North ventured into the Bering Sea on her
maiden voyage, onlookers in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, could have been forgiven
for mistaking the sleek $40 million long-liner for a yacht. The Blue North is
perhaps the country’s highest-tech fishing boat, outfitted with fuel-efficient
engines, automated freezers, and cargo elevators. Its most radical feature,
however, is its “stunner”—an electrified table that knocks cod unconscious
with a direct current of about 35 volts.
On a typical long-lining boat, fish are hauled up over the side. Crew
members impale each struggling cod with a gaffe, tear out the hook, and
fling the creatures aside to bleed or suffocate. The Blue North’s lines, by
contrast, emerge into a “moon pool,” an enclosed chamber that allows
fishermen to control their catch rather than hurl it willy-nilly across the deck.
Cod pass over the stun table within seconds of their arrival; only once a fish
is insensate does a crew member remove the hook and deliver the fatal cut.
It’s easy to forget, while gazing down at your spicy tuna roll, that fishing is a
brutal business. Commercial fishers suffocate halibut, bleed out salmon, and
crush pollock in trawls. Since 1958, the federal Humane Methods of
Slaughter Act has required that terrestrial livestock be rendered insensible
to pain before death, but the law excludes fish. Now, however, one growing
seafood company is beginning to consider the welfare of its catch—and,
perhaps, fomenting a revolution in how we treat our finned brethren.
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Commercial fishermen and recreational anglers—myself included—tend to
justify our cruelty with comforting myths. Fish, according to conventional
wisdom, are unfeeling loners with three-second memories and about as
much interior life as kelp. That unkind stereotype, however, doesn’t
withstand scientific scrutiny. Bluehead wrasse transmit culture across
generations, groupers and eels cooperate, and cleaner fish appear to
recognize themselves in mirrors. The axiom that fish don’t suffer pain—a
claim based primarily on their lack of a cerebral cortex, the structure with
which mammals process stimuli—is also belied by mounting evidence. In her
2010 book, Do Fish Feel Pain?, the Penn State biologist Victoria Braithwaite
argued that “there is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as
there is for birds and mammals—and more than there is for human neonates
and preterm babies.”
Such findings haven’t ended the fish-pain debate—indeed, it’s almost
irresolvable, given that pain is a subjective experience as well as a physical
response. Still, Mike Burns, the founder of the Seattle-based Blue North
Fisheries, gives his slippery quarry the benefit of the doubt. “Maybe they
don’t feel pain—although I believe they do—but they certainly undergo
stress,” Burns told me. “Just look how a fish acts when you take it out of
water.”
Burns arrived at his concern for piscine well-being via a roundabout route. In
1994, Mike and his brother, Patrick, purchased a ranch in eastern Oregon to
supplement their small commercial-fishing business. As they boned up on
the beef industry, they became acquainted with the work of Temple Grandin,
the legendary Colorado State University animal scientist who revolutionized
livestock treatment, developing, among other innovations, standards for
pre-slaughter stunning and curved loading chutes to make cows’ final
moments less stressful. The Burns brothers incorporated Grandin’s
techniques on their ranch, then adapted her principles for fish when they
designed the Blue North, their flagship.
“I think it’s a good approach,” Grandin told me. Rendering fish unconscious
before slaughter, she says, is among the best steps fishermen can take to
facilitate a humane death.
Read: A journey into the animal mind
Although Grandin points out that inventors have filed dozens of patents for
stunning devices, the Blue North is, so far as Burns knows, one of only two
commercial boats in the world to use one. Fish welfare has progressed
further in the aquaculture industry, particularly abroad. Some Canadian fish
farms, for example, knock salmon out with a pneumatic hammer before
slaughter. The U.S.-based Humane Farm Animal Care, which has developed
humane labels for land-based livestock, is currently working on fish-farm
protocols, although Mimi Stein, the nonprofit’s director, said they have yet to
be implemented.
For wild-caught fish, market pressures might ultimately spur considerate
killing; a survey released last fall suggested that half of American consumers
are more likely to buy well-treated fish. At the moment, Burns said, Blue
North’s “Humane Harvest” cod is sold at a handful of Seattle-area
restaurants and markets, and, like organic produce, fetches a modest price
premium. Still, real reform must come from seafood purveyors themselves,
Grandin said. In 1999, McDonald’s, its public image singed by a legal battle
with animal-rights activists, hired her to overhaul its slaughterhouses. “I saw
more change [then] than I had in a 25-year career prior to that,” Grandin
said. The fish-welfare revolution will have truly arrived when the Golden
Arches and its ilk source their pollock sandwiches from boats that humanely
kill their catch."
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