Like the flesh of all animals, the flesh of fish and shellfish is high in the three toxic elements described earlier: saturated animal fat, cholesterol, and animal protein. The percentage of saturated fat relative to unsaturated fat may be “better” in fish than in other animals, but fish is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “low-fat” food. Besides being generally high in fat, cholesterol, and animal protein, and thus encouraging heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and the other negative effects of eating these substances, fish, because they live in water, are generally even more toxic than factory farmed birds and mammals. The basic reason is that the millions of tons of toxins that are produced by our culture all end up, eventually, in the water. The largest share of this pollution comes from animal agriculture in the form of herbicide, pesticide, fungicide, and chemical fertilizer runoff from fields, and sewage from factory farms, rich in drug residues and other toxins.
Waters are further polluted by the whole range of carcinogenic dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), toxic heavy metals from industrial wastes, and other residues from mining, tanning, paper, energy, petroleum, and industrial production, as well as noxious pharmaceutical residues and radioactive contamination from nuclear leakage. In addition to all this, the toxins that pollute the air are eventually washed into lakes and oceans, and solid waste sites and land-fills are also leached by water, which carries their toxins into rivers and aquifer.
Environmental toxins concentrate in the fatty tissue of all animals. This basic fact should give us pause. Both freshwater and saltwater fish amass and store toxic substances and carcinogenic chemicals in their flesh in concentrations that are actually hundreds of thousands of times greater than in the water itself. There are two basic reasons for this. First, fish breathe water, passing it over their gills to extract vital oxygen. Thus, through breathing, all fish consume an enormous amount of water, and the toxins tend to collect in their gills and end up in the fatty tissues of their flesh.
Secondly, large fish are carnivores who live on smaller fish, who in turn live on even smaller fish, who eat still smaller fish. Unlike land animals and birds, who are mostly herbivorous, with a few “top carnivores” who may eat the much more plentiful mice, rabbits, deer, and so forth, fish live in a more carnivorous world. At each level the concentration of toxins multiplies exponentially. We like to eat mainly larger fish, like tuna, swordfish, shark, and salmon. Researchers know that the flesh of large fish contains extremely high concentrations of toxins. …Shellfish also become highly toxic because they typically live closer to shore and are thus bathed in waters that have higher concentrations of noxious effluents. The more toxic agricultural and industrial runoff we produce, the more toxic the flesh of water-dwelling creatures becomes.
People who do not eat saturated animal fats generally have a much lower risk of clogging their arteries. Fish is not “brain food”—in fact, it now may well have become just the opposite—mercury poisons the brain and nerve cells. Because, in our current dietary understanding, a vegan diet can, in theory, meet all the human body’s nutritional needs, and help protect against clogged arteries, heart attacks, strokes and cancers.
Becoming Vegan outlines in detail the plant-based sources of the omega-3 fatty acids that people often eat fish flesh or oil to obtain. The main sources are flax seeds, walnuts, soybeans, tofu, canola oil, hemp oil, dark greens, and seaweeds.
Fish absorb and intensely concentrate toxins like PCBs, dioxins, radioactive substances, and heavy metals like mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic, all of which are linked to cancer as well as nervous system disorders, kidney damage, and impaired mental functioning. They contain excessive amounts of cholesterol, animal protein, and hazardous, blood-altering oils. Besides contributing directly to human disease and suffering through the toxicity of its products, the seafood industry causes enormous damage to marine ecosystems throughout the world.
Fish farmed in commercial aquaculture operations accumulate toxins from the water through gill breathing, and large amounts of antibiotics are routinely used, not only to unnaturally spur growth but also to control the disease that is an ever-present threat in such unhygienic conditions. The fish feed also contains high levels of contaminants, because besides grains it often contains feces, offal, and other by-products of the livestock industry, as well as fish and fish by-products not fit for human or pet consumption.
Saltwater fish farming also involves inhumane and unhealthy over-crowding of the fish, usually in offshore pens. These operations cause an enormous amount of water pollution, forcing thousands of fish to live in highly concentrated areas, with feces, antibiotics, pesticides, and toxic chemicals.
These fish farming operations have an ironically devastating effect on ocean fisheries because the fish being grown require large quantities of other fish in their feed. For example, it takes three to five pounds of wild ocean fish to produce one pound of farmed saltwater fish or shrimp. In addition to all this, fish farming fosters disease that can easily spread to wild salmon or other fish and wipe out whole stocks. This is what has happened with chronic wasting disease in wild elk and deer herds infected by cattle operations.
These once-fecund waters have been, and continue to be, strip-mined for fish, using fishing trawlers with nets many thousands of feet in length, to meet the relentless demand of humans, fish farms, and enslaved food animals. An amazing fifty percent of the world fish catch is fed to the needlessly imprisoned food animals, and not to people.
The carnage caused by modern factory fishing methods is horrific. Huge trawlers, using satellite and radar technology and even helicopters and airplanes, deploy nets that reach to the ocean floor and bring up virtually everything in their path. The fish are often pulled rapidly from such depths that they suffer decompression.
In the course of this marine strip-mining, an enormous number of sea creatures that are “unprofitable” are hauled in. This so-called “by catch” of certain fish, turtles, dolphins, sea birds, and other animals is thrown back into the ocean mostly dead or severely wounded. Every year, this adds up to about twenty-five million tons of dead and dying sea animals.
Entire species of fish are being killed to the verge of extinction to satisfy the demand for fish meal for fattening livestock or factory-farmed fish, or for seafood for humans.
Many other species of marine creatures suffer directly from our unnatural demand for fish flesh. Sea lions, seals, whales, dolphins, and seabirds suffer and often starve because their source of food has been destroyed by human fishing activity.
Every individual fish is a vertebrate with a central nervous system and pain proprioceptors, like we mammals have. Marine biologists have proven that fish definitely do feel and avoid pain and that they learn to evade painful stimuli, even to the degree of selecting the option of food deprivation over pain. Researchers have also proven what is really quite obvious, that fish can be fearful and learn to anticipate pain. Besides this, scientists have discovered that fish and also sea-dwelling invertebrates “generate opiate-like pain-dampening biochemicals in response to injuries that would unquestionably be painful to humans, as further proof of the ability of fish to feel pain.
Recent research has shown that fish are “steeped in social intelligence,” recognizing individual “shoal mates” and social prestige, and scientists have observed them using tools, building complex nests, cooperating, and exhibiting stable cultural traditions and long-term memories.
Fish are sensitive and intelligent creatures, and their flesh, filled with pain, fear, and toxins, is obviously unhealthy for us to eat; yet we persist. Pursuing, confining, slaughtering, and eating them as mere objects to be consumed, we inevitably deaden ourselves spiritually and emotionally as well.
Seafood is simply a socially acceptable form of bush meat. We condemn Africans for hunting monkeys and mammalian and bird species from the jungle yet the developed world thinks nothing of hauling in magnificent wild creatures like swordfish, tuna, halibut, shark, and salmon for our meals. The fact is that the global slaughter of marine wildlife is simply the largest massacre of wildlife on the planet.
We are destroying the earth’s system for cleaning the waters. It is well known that fish clean the waters of toxins and impurities: they can be seen as the earth’s kidneys, absorbing contaminants into their flesh. This is a natural function and an important reason why it is so damaging to the health of the earth that we are drastically reducing their numbers—and to our individual health to actually eat them.
As fecal eaters and flesh eaters, fish are completely inappropriate for human food, “unclean” in every way imaginable. In violently entering their world, imprisoning, manipulating, and killing them, and harming seabirds and marine mammals with them, we are committing crimes against nature on a gigantic scale. It shows our disrespect for life and the benevolent source of all life, which has blessed us with bodies that require not one fish, dolphin, turtle, albatross, lobster, shrimp, or crab to suffer and die for their feeding.
