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Concerns about the loss of aquatic life, including the fish we eat, have rippled around the globe this year with warnings about the loss of certain salmon, the Alaskan Pollock (the fish sticks fish) and of course sharks, which are becoming endangered at alarming rates.
This week brought more hard to digest news, that mountains of edible saltwater fish are being ground up and turned into animal food, for farm-raised fish, chickens and pigs, no less. This raises so many questions that it would be difficult to list them all here. But let’s start with: “What happens when pigs and chickens are forcibly turned into carnivores?” and “We’re catching fish to feed fish, really?”
“It defies reason to drain the ocean of small, wild fishes that could be directly consumed by people in order to produce a lesser quantity of farmed fish,” said Dr. Ellen K. Pikitch, executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science and a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, one sponsor of the study “Forage Fish: From Ecosystems to Markets”.
