Meatonomics (24 page)

The living conditions discussed in this chapter and
Appendix D
might seem apocryphal, exceptional, or illegal. They're not. They're the normal, lawful, day-to-day conditions that industrially raised animals routinely face. For some, these images may suggest a need for change.

Want to have an immediate impact? Here's one idea: stop eating eggs and products made with eggs. Laying hens have it tough regardless of whether they're squeezed into battery cages, stuffed into enriched cages, or crammed into so-called cage-free buildings
at unregulated densities. For a bird subjected to a painful debeaking, starved on a regular basis, and bled to death—while alert—eight years before her time, the differences between one kind of cramped living quarters and another are largely inconsequential. Besides, there's little to suggest that eggs are good for you and much to suggest they're not (
see
Appendix A
). Giving them up will likely lower your cholesterol and could help prevent or reverse heart disease.

If you like eggs for breakfast, try a grilled tofu patty as a fried egg alternative—or a tofu scramble instead of scrambled eggs. For baking, try replacing eggs with banana, applesauce, or a commercial starch-based egg replacer. With these and other plant-based egg substitutes widely available, today it's easier to give up eggs than ever before.

• Science has rejected the once-popular Cartesian view that animals don't feel pain or suffer. Today, we know that all animals raised or caught for food, including fish, feel pain, fear, and stress.
  
• In industrial animal production facilities, where virtually all US animal foods originate, animals are routinely subjected to pain and stress throughout their lives—and often at the moment of their deaths. The biggest problem in fish and factory farms is lifelong hyper-confinement and, for most animals, an almost complete inability to engage in natural behaviors. Routine, unanesthetized amputations of animals' body parts, including debeaking, castration, and tail docking, provide additional sources of pain and stress.
  
• Americans are overwhelmingly concerned about these practices and willing to pay to end them. Live auction research using real dollars suggests Americans would be willing to pay an average of $1,700 per person to end the most egregious of these practices. But until these practices are stopped, animal food producers will continue to impose an estimated $20.7 billion annually in externalized cruelty costs on US consumers.
  

One brilliant Alaskan day a few summers ago, I was sizing up the Kenai River and thinking about putting my kayak in the chilly water. I had driven up from California, paddling some of North America's great rivers along the way—the Skagit in Washington, the Bow in Alberta, and the same Yukon stretch that Jack London worked as a guide during the gold rush. But I hadn't seen anything like this in my travels. It was salmon season, and the fish were running. At the river's wide mouth, where the silty, gray waters emptied into the Pacific Ocean's Cook Inlet, the banks and shallows of the lower Kenai were lined with anglers by the score.

Salmon can be taken in that part of the river only by hand or net. And since most people lack the hand size or speed of a bear's paw, they use a hoop net—a nine-foot pole attached to a huge, netted bag. While I watched, people of all skill levels and walks of life yanked glinting king salmon from the water with little effort. Further upstream, where the water narrows, the spruces and willows grow denser, and people aren't allowed to fish, I would later see eagles and grizzly bears enjoying their share of the bounty. The regular glimpses of salmon being taken by people and animals suggested abundance almost without limits.

During its ocean phase, the royalty of the salmon family sports a sparkling silver coat with areas of blue-green or purple on its back. Once known as June Hogs because of their size and the seasonality of their runs, king salmon routinely used to weigh 80 to 100 pounds as adults and grow to five feet or more in length. But today, kings are lucky to reach half that size. As I later learned, the scenes that I mistook for the animal's abundance in Alaska were in fact images of
decline. In fact, the king salmon fishery, like so many others on the planet, is in distress. The annual Alaskan catch of king salmon has fallen by half in the past several decades, and the numbers are even worse in Washington, Oregon, and California.

Beyond the obvious reason for this decline—overfishing—there are additional causes whose connections are harder to fathom. Salmon hatcheries, for example, are intended to help wild salmon populations. So why do hatcheries wind up harming the very species they're trying to help? The answers lie in the supply-driven pressures of meatonomics—which maybe, just for this chapter, we'll call “fishonomics.” In the pages below, I explore these and other questions and suggest solutions to some of fishing's pressing economic problems. It should come as little surprise that these problems are largely about the money—that is, the desire of those who fish industrially or operate commercial fish farms to maximize their profits.

It's instructive to look at another marine animal whose numbers, like those of salmon, are shrinking: the leatherback turtle. The planet's fastest reptile, and the largest one after crocodiles, the leatherback has a ridged back and looks like an art deco spaceship in miniature. This prehistoric creature can grow to nearly ten feet, swim 20 miles per hour, migrate six thousand miles, and dive almost a mile. It's also unique among turtles for its lack of a bony shell, instead sporting a carapace of firm, rubbery skin.

Leatherbacks debuted in the Cretaceous period and have been around for 110 million years. But if things continue as they have for the past few decades, this century could be their last. Leatherback populations have fallen by as much as 95 percent in the past twenty years, and the species is now listed as critically endangered under the Endangered Species Act and international treaties.
¹
These laws prohibit killing leatherbacks or selling their body parts. Yet despite this protection, tens of thousands of leatherbacks and other threatened or endangered sea turtles are
legally
killed yearly.

The loophole is a provision that permits what's known as incidental taking. This exception allows fishing enterprises that follow certain guidelines to lawfully kill endangered animals in the normal course of fishing. In federal waters, for example, shrimp trawlers can kill endangered turtles with impunity while fishing—provided they've installed a turtle excluding device (TED) in their nets, which theoretically allows turtles to escape. However, TEDs aren't perfect, and they often fail to save turtles' lives.
²
What's more, the use of TEDs is not monitored or enforced well in foreign waters, and they are not even required in many US state waters. Thus, in the Gulf of Mexico, where TEDs are not required, fishing activities in 2010 and 2011 led to an eightfold increase in sea turtle deaths over prior years.
³
“One of the greatest threats to sea turtle populations,” notes the UN, “is capture in fishing gear.”
⁴

This massive collateral damage is a consequence of the fish industry's counterpart to land-based CAFOs: factory fishing. Today, more than twenty-three thousand factory ships weighing 100 tons or more patrol the world's oceans, typically staying at sea for weeks at a time and catching and processing huge quantities of fish.
⁵
Two of the most common industrial fishing methods, trawling and longlining, are also among the least discriminate. Trawlers drag a large, open-mouthed net that catches everything in its path. Longliners, by comparison, pull a length of individually baited hooks that trail for fifty miles or more behind the ship, enticing any hungry animal in the vicinity to take a fatal bite. Like trawl nets, longlines snare considerable amounts of unintended haul, or bycatch.

While some countries prohibit discards of certain species, the overwhelming practice is to throw back bycatch dead.
⁶
Thus, in most of the world's oceans, where little attention is paid to bycatch, factory fishing spells trouble for every fish, bird, mammal, or reptile unlucky enough to make contact with the juggernaut of nets or hooks that trail behind ships. Besides endangered turtles, other rare or threatened animals like dolphins and seabirds often die in a net or on a line. The albatross is one of the planet's most threatened creatures, with seventeen of twenty-two albatross species considered vulnerable,
endangered, or critically endangered under international standards (the other five are labeled “near endangered”).
⁷
One study counted at least forty-four thousand fishing-related albatross deaths in southern oceans each year, with researchers concluding that longlining was causing “serious declines in albatross populations.”
⁸

According to the latest estimate, the amount of marine life killed each year as bycatch is a stunning
40 percent
of the total worldwide intended catch.
⁹
That's almost 200 million pounds of nontarget, dead animals
each day
, or 10,000 pounds in the time it took you to read this sentence.
¹⁰
Whether you love seafood and eat it regularly or never touch the stuff, this arbitrary waste of life just reeks. As the authors of a 2009 study noted, bycatch is “one of the most significant nature conservation issues in the world today.”
¹¹
But even these massive figures don't tell the full story, as the bycatch ratios are much higher in certain regions or in connection with certain target species. Flatfish trawling in Alaska generates two pounds of bycatch for each pound of target fish.
¹²
Shrimp trawling in the Gulf of Mexico generates 10 pounds of bycatch for each pound of shrimp.
¹³
Further, the issues extend beyond the long shadow of dead animals trailing each plate of shrimp scampi or baked cod. Bycatch generates huge economic costs as well.

The hidden price of bycatch stems mainly from two problems: loss of juveniles of the target species and destruction of nontarget fish with commercial value. For example, researchers estimate that in the Northeast, eliminating bycatch would double the value of the Gulf of Maine fisheries, or regional fish habitats.
¹⁴
Another estimate finds that the value of marketable species discarded in the North Sea bottomfish fishery equals the value of fish caught.
¹⁵
In light of these and similar studies, the UN notes that aggregate annual economic losses resulting from bycatch “run into billions of dollars” and “in many fisheries the losses due to discard mortalities . . .
equal or exceed
landed catches.”
¹⁶

The loss of juveniles as bycatch is one of the reasons fisheries deteriorate and become underproductive. Nevertheless, destructive economic forces encourage commercial fishing fleets to keep operating
even in overexploited, unprofitable fisheries. The World Bank and UN report that even as the world's fisheries continue to decline, twice the vessels needed for the task continue to pursue the global fishing catch.
¹⁷
With so many of the world's fisheries losing productivity, why do fishing enterprises keep exploiting them and making them even less profitable? The answer lies in a powerful economic force: fishing subsidies.

Give someone a fish, and you feed him for a day. Subsidize his fishing, and he'll do it for life—whether or not it's sustainable. In the United States, state and federal governments dole out $2.3 billion in handouts to the US fishing industry yearly.
¹⁸
That is to say, of the $0.59 average per pound collected by US fishers for their catch, $0.28 (or nearly half) is paid by taxpayers.
¹⁹
Yet the United States is not the only country to subsidize its fishing industry, and we're not nearly the most generous. Worldwide fishing subsidies total more than $25 billion, with Japan and China paying the most at $4.6 billion and $4.1 billion, respectively.
²⁰

Because fishing subsidies artificially reduce production costs, they encourage people to fish even in overexploited and unproductive fisheries. The World Bank and the UN say these incentives, which they condemn as “perverse,” cost the fishing industry $51 billion yearly by diminishing the productivity of the world's oceans.
²¹
Subsidies also contribute to the collapse (that is, the decline by more than 90 percent) of many of the world's fisheries. Worldwide, humans have caused nearly one-third of fished species to collapse.
²²
Without aggressive intervention, experts say, this trend will lead to the global ruin of
all fished species
by the middle of this century.
²³

When a regional fish population collapses, it not only idles humans employed in the local fishing sector, but it also disrupts the local marine ecosystem. “The least movement is of importance to all nature,” remarked the polymath Blaise Pascal centuries ago. “The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” Research shows that the loss of biodiversity caused by one marine species's collapse makes it more
likely that other species in the ecosystem will go bust.
²⁴
It's a classic domino effect. A collapsed fishery typically leads to reduced populations of larger fish, marine mammals, and seabirds, and the loss of competition can cause an increase in populations of less marketable species like jellyfish.

A fishery's disintegration can also lead to bizarre and unexpected human responses. Commercial fishing extracted mountains of valuable cod from the North Atlantic for more than a century, taking well over a billion pounds in some years.
²⁵
When overfishing led to the cod fishery's collapse in 1992, Canada reacted by banning cod fishing in the North Atlantic. Practically overnight, thirty-five thousand Newfoundland fishing workers lost their jobs.
²⁶
The ban was unpopular, to say the least, especially among Newfoundlanders, and according to some commentators, the government needed a scapegoat.