Field Report- The Battery Chicken of the Sea
Darlings.
This fox has been to Scotland. Not for the whisky — though one did partake, mes choux, it would have been rude not to — but on a matter of some urgency. I had heard rumours about what was happening in the sea lochs of the west coast and I needed to see it with my own eyes.
I wish I hadn't.
Picture the scene, darlings. You arrive at dusk. The loch is still and beautiful — mountains, water, the whole romantic business. And then you see them: vast floating pens, row after row, packed with salmon. Tens of thousands of fish in each cage. And the smell, mes choux. Even by fox standards — and I have, as you know, rummaged through some fairly challenging bins in my time — the smell was something else entirely.
These are not the salmon of your imagination. Not the wild, magnificent creatures that leap upstream, that have been carved into Pictish stones, that are woven into the very mythology of Scotland. No. These are lice-eaten, lesion-covered, antibiotic-dosed fish, crammed into underwater cages so tightly that a quarter of them die before they ever reach the slaughterhouse.
Un quart, mes choux.
Imagine telling a head chef you were going to throw away twenty-five percent of everything he prepped. You'd be out on your ear by lunch.
And it gets worse. Last October, seventy-five thousand farmed salmon escaped from a single pen in Loch Linnhe during a storm — bred for rapid growth, not survival, now loose among their wild cousins whose genetics they threaten to destroy.
Only three hundred thousand wild Atlantic salmon return to Scotland's rivers each year, darlings. Do the arithmetic. Meanwhile, the industry recorded its worst death rates in thirty-five years, with over thirty-five million salmon dying on Scottish farms in just three years. The regulator — and I use the term with considerable generosity — managed precisely two unannounced inspections in the same period.
Two.
And here is the part that really makes this fox's brush stand on end: these fish are fed on wild fish, hauled from the seas off the Congo and the Antarctic by industrial supertrawlers. So when the supermarket tells you farmed salmon is the responsible choice, what they mean is: we've replaced one magnificent wild creature with a factory-farmed one, and destroyed several other fisheries in the process to feed it. Quelle honte.
Oh — and the organic label? Salmon farming is the only organic sector in the UK permitted to use chemicals. Let that settle in, darlings, like a sea louse on a gill.
So. What does a fox — a fox who has dined on truly wild salmon by the banks of the Spey with a ghillie and a half-bottle of something indecent — what does such a fox say?
Stop buying it.
Just stop. Stop buying farmed salmon from the supermarket. Stop feeding your children the battery chicken of the sea.
And if you think wild salmon is some impossible luxury — au contraire, mes choux, au contraire.
In a narrow strip of land between Canada and the Pacific Ocean sits the fishing town of Juneau, Alaska, and from its harbour a chap called Tyson and a dozen of his fellow fishermen head out into the Gulf of Alaska to catch stunning wild Alaskan salmon — with rod and line, darlings. Hook and line. No nets, no pens, no supertrawlers, no lice, no chemicals, no floating factory. Just a man and a boat.
Because wild salmon can recover. Other species have bounced back when given the chance. But not while the lochs are full of floating factories, and not while we keep buying the product that makes the whole rotten circus commercially viable.
Stop buying the farmed stuff. Start asking questions. And if you want salmon that was caught properly, by someone who can tell you exactly where and how — well, darlings, you know where to find it.
Toodle pip.
R.
X
PS — To the salmon farming executive I spotted at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Edinburgh last month, eating the wild halibut: yes, darling, I noticed. This fox notices everything.
