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| They Die Slowly…
“[Fish] are our fellow citizens with scales
and fins… -Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration As the
director of PETA’s U.K. office, I’ll stand up for any animal
who needs help-from the tiniest mouse to the mightiest
The documentary crew wanted to film me aboard a commercial fishing
boat in Norway, so we traveled to Mehamn, on the northern tip of the
country, well into the frigid Arctic. I was expecting to go out on
a large trawler, but it turned out to be a tiny two-person gill netter,
which is even worse-though it hardly seems possible-for the fish
who are caught. On a trawler or purse seiner, like the one you see
here, fish are hauled up in masses and dumped onto the deck. These
boats use huge nets, some of which stretch for miles, that indiscriminately
swallow up everything-and everyone-in their paths. Fish come out
of the nets with their flanks scraped completely raw from being forced
to rub against rocks, debris and other fish trapped in the
A few fish were considered too small to take and were tossed back into the sea. “That fish will not survive,” I told Bjorn, the ship’s captain, and he said, “Oh, the birds will take care of it.” From the net, the fish were roughly tossed into a metal bin, landing with a thud. Some were still thrashing, some were too tired; many were vomiting up their guts, their eyes bulging from the pressure change. Some of these fish may have been struggling in the nets for up to 24 hours. After a few minutes, their gill arches were slit and they were thrown into the next bin, where they twitched and gasped, slowly bleeding to death. Later, the fish were gutted and beheaded. The sea was very rough for half the day, and it was extremely cold-I was bundled up in a huge Arctic suit, with just my face peeking out. But the absolute worst thing for me, physically, was the overwhelming stench of fish vomit. It was not long before I was covered with fish blood, vomit and guts.
The magazine that I read on my flight to Mehamn had an article about the fishing industry in Norway, boasting about how it uses all parts of the cod. On the boat I was on, the head and viscera-half of the dead animal-were thrown overboard. Such waste is not unusual. Every year, commercial fishers dump more than 20 million tons of nontargeted fish alone-most of them dead or dying-back into the oceans; that’s one-fourth of all the fish caught worldwide. This figure doesn’t even take into account the other hapless animals-turtles, sea birds, seals-who are unfortunate enough to be caught in the boats’ massive nets. And for what? So many beautiful, thinking, feeling animals-who value their lives as we value ours-needlessly killed because we humans can’t seem to break our addiction to the taste of flesh.
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elephant. But anyone who knows me will tell you that I have a soft spot
in my heart for fish. Before I came to England, my coworkers at PETA’s
headquarters in the U.S. dubbed me “Miss Fish” because of
my efforts to let others know how fish suffer when hooked for fun or
food. So, when a filmmaker from Norway’s TV2 contacted me about
producing a documentary about PETA’s Anti-Fishing Campaign, I
jumped at the chance to raise awareness about the horrors that these
beautiful creatures endure on the journey from sea to supermarket. The
rest was torture… 
net
with them. But a gill netter is even worse for the fish. Every fish
caught is entangled in the net, and the fish come aboard one by one
as the net is reeled in. It’s a more invasive process, a more personal
one, and each and every fish is handled by the workers. I watched
as cod after cod was violently extracted from the net-hundreds of
fish squeezed and torn out of the tangle, the net slicing into their
bodies. “It will soon be over,” I silently told them-and
myself. 
If
you haven’t yet tried delicious faux seafood, now’s the
time. Health food stores sell Worthington Foods’ fish-free Tuno,
and Web sites