EDIT: AS POINTED OUT BY LOCALDEITY THIS COMMENT IS WRONG—I CONFUSED ANNUAL AND DAILY FISH DEATHS. HOWEVER, IT IS THE CASE THAT THIS POST OVERSTATES THE NUMBER OF FISH KILLED FROM FISH FARMS. SEE COMMENTS BELOW FOR CLARIFICATION.
I was going to call you out for a bit of a bait-and-switch in the paragraph starting ‘Lewis Bollard notes...’
Lewis Bollard notes “The fishing industry alone kills 3-8 billion animals every day, most by slow suffocation, crushing, or live disemboweling.” So roughly the same number of fish are killed in horrifying, inhumane ways every few days as there are people on earth.
because the 3-8 billion number is for *wild* fish killed each year, not farmed fish (Lewis Bollard cites this article which explicitly states ‘Marine invertebrates and farmed fish are not included in this estimate’). I can think of several reasons why eating wild caught fish is less bad than farmed fish (eg. the fish were not brought into existence by demand for them, wild conditions are less bad (?) than farm conditions, they were going to die anyway and dying a ‘natural’ death for a wild fish is plausibly no better than dying after being caught etc.)
However, after a cursory bit of background research it seems like the 3-8 billion figure massively *understates* your case. Two estimates that I found here and here suggest that the actual figure for annual farmed fish killed per year is somewhere between 50 and 170 billion.
Your paragraph using the 3-8 billion figure is still misleading, but the truth only strengthens your case.
You quote 3-8 billion per day, then the other numbers you mention are annual numbers. 3-8 billion per day would be ~1-3 trillion per year. Seems your first reaction may have been more accurate.
Yes, so the 3-8 billion fish per day does overstate the number of farmed fish killed. The real number of farmed fish killed per day is somewhere between 0.1 billion and 0.5 billion, which is a lot less than the wild fish killed per day.
EDIT: AS POINTED OUT BY LOCALDEITY THIS COMMENT IS WRONG—I CONFUSED ANNUAL AND DAILY FISH DEATHS. HOWEVER, IT IS THE CASE THAT THIS POST OVERSTATES THE NUMBER OF FISH KILLED FROM FISH FARMS. SEE COMMENTS BELOW FOR CLARIFICATION.
I was going to call you out for a bit of a bait-and-switch in the paragraph starting ‘Lewis Bollard notes...’
because the 3-8 billion number is for *wild* fish killed each year, not farmed fish (Lewis Bollard cites this article which explicitly states ‘Marine invertebrates and farmed fish are not included in this estimate’). I can think of several reasons why eating wild caught fish is less bad than farmed fish (eg. the fish were not brought into existence by demand for them, wild conditions are less bad (?) than farm conditions, they were going to die anyway and dying a ‘natural’ death for a wild fish is plausibly no better than dying after being caught etc.)
However, after a cursory bit of background research it seems like the 3-8 billion figure massively *understates* your case. Two estimates that I found here and here suggest that the actual figure for annual farmed fish killed per year is somewhere between 50 and 170 billion.
Your paragraph using the 3-8 billion figure is still misleading, but the truth only strengthens your case.
You quote 3-8 billion per day, then the other numbers you mention are annual numbers. 3-8 billion per day would be ~1-3 trillion per year. Seems your first reaction may have been more accurate.
Oh damn, you’re right. That was a stupid mistake.
Yes, so the 3-8 billion fish per day does overstate the number of farmed fish killed. The real number of farmed fish killed per day is somewhere between 0.1 billion and 0.5 billion, which is a lot less than the wild fish killed per day.