New undercover video appears to show cruel treatment of salmon at Cooke hatchery amid push for ‘chickenification’ of fish

TheTrump administrationis keen to do to fish what has been done to chickens – mass-produce them on an industrial scale to accelerate the US’s output of seafood.

But this “chickenification” of fish may come at a hefty cost to the environment and to the fish themselves, as a new undercover video at one of the country’s leading fish farms has highlighted.

A major seafood company is again under investigation over allegations of animal abuse after a second undercover video taken at a salmon breeding farm inMaineappeared to show cruel treatment of fish and environmentally harmful practices.

Thecovert videotaken by the Animal Outlook activist group, which it sent to the Guardian, shows staff at theCooke Aquaculturesalmon hatchery in Bingham, Maine, clubbing fish with metal poles, aiming kicks at them as they writhe on the ground and in one instance cutting into a living fish. Deformities and fungal infections were also prevalent in the fish, according to Animal Outlook.

Employees told the undercover activist that they give the fish feed contaminated by rats, have mistakenly let penned fish escape into surrounding wild waterways and that they kill thousands of fish because they have produced too many of them.

“Unfortunately I don’t think the company is in it for the fish health side, they just want fish production,” one worker states on the video.

The video, shot between September and December last year by an activist who worked as a hatchery technician, is the second such undercover recording taken by Animal Outlook at the same facility. In 2019,a similar video shot undercover by the groupshowed deformed salmon thrown into plastic containers where they suffocated.

“Granted, we did a lot of stuff we weren’t supposed to fucking do,” one employee said on the latest video about the previous exposé. The staff member recounts how he was shown on the first video throwing fish like basketballs while shouting “Kobe” and how he wanted to send a horse’s tongue to the “animal activist bitch” who went undercover at the facility.

The video shows mistreatment “about bad as it gets”, said Jareb Gleckel, director of legal advocacy at Animal Outlook. “The facility has no oversight,” he added. “Seven years after the first investigation, this is a systemic issue.”

Source: Drudge Report