27,000: According to the British Medical Association there are 37,677 doctors working in General Practice in the UK. By comparison, there are approximately 27,000 veterinary surgeons working across the country. Twenty-seven thousand practicing vets suggests a lot of sick animals for them to treat. Of course, many of these animals are the dogs and cats who we treat as part of our family, but there are many farmed animals too. There are about 9.6 million cows, 4.7 million pigs, 32 million sheep and an estimated 178 million chickens.
Not so long ago, the BBC TV programme Countryfile was speaking to young farmers and one young and very wise chap said simply that wherever there are live animals there are dead animals too. Critics of salmon farming often say that if the level of mortality observed in (cold-blooded) salmon was seen in (warn-blooded) farmed animals, there would be a public outcry.
Death is a daily fact of life in British farming and salmon farming critics are just as ill-informed of British agriculture as they are of salmon farming. Death in farmed animals is simply something that is not talked about because most people realise that farming is not without issue. I have written in the past that one of the best accounts of death on British farms was written by writer Bella Bathurst in her book Field Work: What Land Does to People and What People Do to Land. The relevant chapter was published as a Guardian long read: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/13/the-knacker-the-toughest-job-in-british-farming
The chapter is titled – the knackerman: the toughest job in British farming, For those readers who are not familiar with British agriculture, the knackerman is the person who comes to collect dead animals from farms. Bella accompanied one such knackerman on his daily rounds. He was one of 12 drivers working collecting dead animals every day for a ‘fallen stock’ firm in the West Midlands. The full account is worth reading but I have copied one paragraph which highlights the issues
“The day I went with Carswell (the driver) on his rounds was a Tuesday, after a bank holiday weekend of thunderstorms, sudden downpours and shifts in temperature so sharp that the roads smoked. Animals don’t like these atmospheric leaps and plunges any more than humans do. Young lambs may not be able to tolerate the lurch from warm day to evening chill, and these murky, fevered days breed fly-strikes: flies lay their eggs in the sheep’s fleece, producing maggots that then feed off wounds and can, if left unchecked, prove fatal. And that’s without the hazards of cast sheep (pregnant ewes who have rolled over and can’t get up again), sheep with scrapie or scab or liver fluke. The deaths go on all the time, quietly, unobserved, in the corners of fields and byres.”
It is the last sentence that caught my eye – the deaths go on all the time, quietly, unobserved in the corners of fields and byres.
Salmon are cold blooded animals. Their lifecycle is very different to terrestrial farm animals. Sheep for example may have just one lamb, sometimes two and in some case three. The lambs are up on their feet soon after birth, dependent on their mother’s milk for some time before beginning to graze the fields.
Salmon produce thousands of eggs, typically 600-800 eggs per pound of body weight. In the wild, just one or two of these eggs may develop into an adult that manages to return to breed itself. The rest do not survive either because they were eaten or succumbed to a disease. However, just because a salmon lays thousands of eggs does not mean that they are all viable. Some fish that hatch may be considered in the same way as the runt in a litter of pigs – just not likely to do well.
On salmon farms, the survival of salmon is much higher than in the wild. This is because the fish are protected from predators and disease. However, such protection does not mean that all eggs will survive through to harvest size fish. Every egg is different to another, and the outcome can be very different for each.
The wild fish sector is currently undertaking a campaign to persuade anglers to minimise their handling of the fish they catch as well as to keep the fish in the water and avoid lifting it out of the water to take the obligatory selfie. This is because handling the fish can lead to stress and mortality. Catch and release is estimated to experience at least a 12% mortality but because this tends to happen after the fish are released, the fish usually dies unseen and unrecorded. Even fish that don’t die immediately can succumb eventually. An angling friend regularly tells me of his experiences of catching fish with fungal growth in the shape of a hand around the caudal peduncle. Such fungal infections have only one outcome.
Whilst, anglers refuse to accept criticism of catch and release, they are forthcoming when it comes to mortality on farms, even though the main reason for mortality is the excessive treatment for sea lice demanded by government to maintain sea lice at a unnecessarily low threshold. This is a classic example of salmon farm critics complaining when sea lice levels become elevated and then demanding ever lower thresholds should be imposed but when farmers then treat their fish with licensed veterinary products, they complain about excessive use of chemicals and then when the fish die, due to excessive treatment and associated handling, they complain about the level of mortality.
The fact is that mortality is not the real issue; it is just another opportunity to attack the salmon farming industry in a mistaken belief that if it wasn’t for salmon farming, then Scottish rivers would be teeming with hundreds of fish for anglers to catch and kill.
Have to learn: Geir Arne Ystmark regional director for the Norwegian Food Safety Authority told iLAKS that farmers must learn from what has happened in recent weeks and build up a capacity for such events. He was referring to the fact that elevated temperatures in northern Norway had brought about an increase in lice numbers on salmon farms, although the number of lice recorded was not any higher than elsewhere in Norway. The higher lice numbers had caught some farmers by surprise and consequently the infrastructure to treat these fish to maintain levels at 0.5 adult female lice per fish was not in place. Hence there was a scramble to find ways to ensure that the official lice limit was not broken.
However, I can only wonder whether there is anything else that can be learnt from this unusual lice event. The elevated temperatures came at the end of September which in itself is quite unusual but September is at the end of the salmon fishing season. Even in Scotland, those salmon that have returned to spawn and propagate the next generation of wild salmon can be found in the rivers in freshwater, far from any salmon farm. Returning adult salmon are likely to be infested with sea lice, a mark of a freshly run fish so prized by anglers. High lice levels on farms at this time of year would have no impact on wild salmon at all.
The established narrative is based on the assumption that high levels of lice on a farm could infest salmon smolts as they migrate out to sea, although there is no evidence to prove this actually happens. The Scientific Committee for Salmon Management (VRL) last estimated the impact of sea lice from salmon farms as being a mortality of 39,000 smolts but this is simply an estimation, not a proven fact. The reality is that counts of even 9 sea lice on farmed fish are unlikely to have any impact on wild fish at all and certainly not at this time of year. Thus forcing farmers to treat or even slaughter fish to maintain a low level is a somewhat pointless exercise. If there is any thing to learn from this event, it is not to overact, just because regulation says so.
The biggest problem of all is that just because a lice count of a few fish finds an average count of 9 lice, doesn’t mean that the whole pen is infested at this level too because the likelihood is that it is not.
In Scotland, one anti-salmon campaigner regularly manages to persuade the press to publish images of one or two fish that are badly damaged sea lice and then claims that these fish are typical of all the fish in the pen when clearly the evidence of just looking in the pen shows that they are not typical at all. There is no typical or average when it comes to sea lice but the established narrative assumes there is and sadly, this is now reflected in the Government regulation too.
I fully understand that the salmon farming sector needs to cooperate with the regulators but I wonder how long that this can continue before the authorities recognise that there needs to be a new discussion about sea lice and the alleged impacts on wild fish. As can be seen from the next commentary, salmon are in trouble where there is no salmon farming and no associated sea lice.
Not rocket science: The Times newspaper has asked why salmon stocks have hit a record low. The short answer is a lack of prey, climate change and pollutions are all having a big impact but the Times says that experts claim that the answer to helping the species thrive ‘are not rocket science’. Given that salmon stocks have been in decline since the early 1970s, this ‘not rocket science’ doesn’t seem to have worked because wild salmon are certainly not thriving.
Dylan Roberts, head of fisheries at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, an organisation that believes that field sports (in particular shooting and fishing) can contribute substantially to the conservation of landscape, habitat and wildlife told the Times that the answers to saving salmon in the UK are ‘not rocket science’. Barriers must be removed; rivers rewiggled to create new spawning habitat; farmers should prevent run off and sewage infrastructure should be improved and trees should be planted to shade rivers and keep waters cool.
Unfortunately, whilst these solutions may be ‘not rocket science’, neither will they do anything to prevent salmon stocks declining further because they do not address the fundamental issue of why salmon are in decline.
Sadly for salmon, stock changing solutions will never happen whilst those who lead the debate are focussed on salmon fisheries not salmon the fish. The Times also spoke to Dr Janina Gray of Wild Fish who said that we’re definitely eating too much salmon. We are trying to produce a carnivorous fish in mass quantities. It used to be a luxury item now its ubiquitous across menus. Farmed salmon is not a sustainable option. Seemingly wild salmon can become less able to cope with climate change and are genetically weaker by breeding with farm escapers. They can also contract sea lice that are prevalent in wild populations. Unfortunately Dr Gray does not explain how salmon farms in the north of Scotland are responsible for the declines of wild salmon in the south of England. As Salmon Scotland told the Times, Wild Fish’s obsession with salmon farming is doing nothing to tackle the real root causes behind Atlantic salmon’s decline.
As with sea lice, wild salmon’s declines will continue to make the news every year because there is no discussion about the real causes of wild salmon’s problems. Until such a time this happens, the wild fisheries sector will continue to pat themselves on the back when a barrier is removed or a few trees planted telling themselves what a good job they are doing meanwhile, they are unknowingly waving farewell to salmon from UK rivers forever.